The Lake Forest Park Sidewalk
Paperback
Ships in 2 to 5 working days. Delivery quoted from your address at checkout.
Read the opening free
4,293 words · no email, no account
No. 072 · Letters & Ideas · Literature
The St. Croix Years
a biography of Audrey Geraldine Lorde
What the book is
Harlem, 1934. A girl who will not speak until she is nearly five sits with her mother's Grenadian vowels in her mouth, learning that language is a thing you can hoard, sharpen, and finally spend.
Naima Beauford follows Audre Lorde from that early silence through the Catholic schoolrooms of wartime New York, the lesbian bars of the Village in the fifties, a brief and bewildering marriage, the births of her children, and the long apprenticeship that turned a librarian into one of the defining poets and essayists of her century. Drawing on Lorde's journals, her correspondence with Adrienne Rich and Pat Parker, and interviews with the women who loved and argued with her, Beauford traces the making of a writer who insisted on every word of her own description: black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.
The biography moves carefully through the harder rooms — the breast cancer diagnosis of 1978, the prosthesis Lorde refused, the years in St. Croix, the fights inside a feminism that was not always ready for her. It asks what it costs to speak, and what it costs more not to.
At its center is the image Lorde gave us herself: the coal, pressure-made, black, and capable of light.
At a glance
- Subject
- Audrey Geraldine Lorde
- Shelf
- Letters & Ideas · Literature
- Written by
- Naima Beauford
- Chapters
- 18 across 186 pages
- Narrated by
- Imogen Vey
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 18 chapters
- 01The Girl Who Spoke in PoemsRead free
- 02Carriacou3,220 words
- 03Hunter3,393 words
- 04The Librarian3,175 words
- 05The First Cities3,008 words
- 06Cables to Rage3,235 words
- 07The Black Lesbian Mother3,148 words
- 08Coal2,908 words
- 09The Black Unicorn3,458 words
- 10The Master's Tools3,213 words
- 11The Cancer Journals3,639 words
- 12Zami3,044 words
- 13Sister Outsider3,196 words
- 14Kitchen Table Press3,154 words
- 15A Burst of Light3,195 words
- 16Berlin3,207 words
- 17Gamba Adisa3,014 words
- 18The Words That Survived3,296 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 186 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- Hardcover · $24.99
- 6 × 9 in · 186 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90470-041-6 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Imogen Vey
ISBN 979-8-90623-022-5
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is The St. Croix Years about?
Audrey Geraldine Lorde. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The St. Croix Years — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,293 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 59,500 words, 18 chapters, 186 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
