Coal

Coal is one of the earliest collections of poems by a woman who, Adrienne Rich writes, "for the complexity of her vision, for her moral courage and the catalytic passion of her language, has already become, for many, an indispensable poet."
Marilyn Hacker captures the essence of Lorde and her poetry: "Black, lesbian, mother, urban woman: none of Lorde's selves has ever silenced the others; the counterpoint among them is often the material of her strongest poems."

Audre Lorde (1934-1992) defined herself as "black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet." Born in Harlem to Caribbean parents, she published nine volumes of poetry (including Coal and The Black Unicorn), five works of prose (including The Cancer Journals and Sister Outsider), and a biomythography (Zami: A New Spelling of My Name).
Jane Anna Gordon teaches at UCONN, where she is a core affiliate with Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is, most recently, author of Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement, co-editor, with Drucilla Cornell, of Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg, and executive editor, with Lewis R. Gordon, of Philosophy and Global Affairs.
Briona Simone Jones teaches English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UCONN. She is editor of Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought, the most comprehensive anthology centering Black Lesbian thought to date. Jones developed the concept of "Black Lesbian Aesthetics" to describe the heretical shift in self-definition that transpired after the groundbreaking formation of the Combahee River Collective in 1974.
Elva Orozco Mendoza teaches Political Science and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UCONN. A 2020 Junior Faculty Fellow at The Institute for Citizens & Scholars, her work has been published in Theory and Event, New Political Science, The Journal of Latin American Perspectives, and Philosophy and Global Affairs. Orozco Mendoza is currently completing a book manuscript where she theorizes the concept of the maternal contract.
Sherry Zane is Interim Director of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UCONN, which has quadrupled the size of its faculty under her leadership. In 2018 she published "'I did it for the Uplift of Humanity and the Navy': Same-Sex Acts and the Origins of the National Security State, 1919-1921" (New England Quarterly) and is currently co-authoring (with Elva Orozco Mendoza and Bhakti Shringarpure) a grant-funded book titled, Insurgent Murals, on feminist insurgent murals in Argentina, Northern Ireland, and Sudan.