:: Audre Lorde was born in New York City in 1934. Her first poem was published in Seventeen magazine while she was in high school. Lorde received her B.A. from Hunter College and M.L.S. from Columbia University. After serving as a librarian in New York public schools, she became writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi and published her first collection of poems, The First Cities. In 1972, From a Land Where Other People Live was nominated for a National Book Award. Lorde's writing was often controversial and poet Adrienne Rich commented, "Lorde writes as a Black woman, a mother, a daughter, a Lesbian, a feminist, a visionary." In total, Lorde published nine volumes of poetry and five works of prose and was the poet laureate of New York from 1991-1992. She died of breast cancer in 1992.