Even if you don’t know who Audre Lorde is, you’ve probably encountered her ideas in the world or, at the very least, scrolled past them on social media. Lines from her poems and essays are just as likely to appear in an Instagram post as on a protest sign or in a pamphlet for an academic conference: “We were never meant to survive.” “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” “Your silence will not protect you.”

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Lorde’s most oracular line, however, is not as popular, though she said it frequently into her later years. “What I leave behind has a life of its own.” She knew that her work was shifting consciousness. Expanding it. And that it would outlive her.

Lorde rose to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s as one of the most lauded thinkers and multigenre writers of her time. She penned ferocious essays on lesbian parenting and healing Black self-hatred. She traveled extensively and wrote about what she saw, connecting the struggles of Black women living under apartheid in South Africa to the United States’ invasion of Grenada and articulating new visions of feminism. She insisted that the women’s movement consider the needs and political realities of Black women and that the Black nationalist and civil rights movement address its homophobia and not ignore its gay and lesbian brethren.

Lorde brought her entire self to any setting that she was in. In 1982, at age 48, she published “Zami,” a genre-fluid memoir that detailed her coming of age as a lesbian in downtown New York in the 1950s and the relationships that shaped her consciousness as an adult. Lorde described herself as a “Black lesbian feminist warrior poet” as a means of making all her identities known simultaneously. She made the road as she walked it.

ImageAudre Lorde in her home study on Staten Island in 1981, around the time she wrote her autobiographical book “Zami.”Credit...JEB/Joan E. Biren

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