Imani Henry

Imani Henry is a Brooklyn-based Caribbean social worker and community organizer for numerous activist movements, including: queer, trans, and immigrant rights; anti-war demonstrations; anti-death penalty and police brutality; and anti-racism. He has worked with TransJustice (a part of the Audre Lorde Project geared toward transgender people of color) and contributed to several literary collections, including does your mama know? An Anthology of Black Lesbian Coming Out Stories and Voices Rising: Celebrating 20 Years of Black Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Writing. At the time of this writing he is heading a pushback against gentrification in Brooklyn and working for OD for the People, a company that helps develop non-profits within an anti-oppression framework.

His Twitter account can be found here; his Tumblr, here. Both are filled with calls to action and photographs from activist campaigns.

Audre Lorde

Caribbean-American poet and academic Audre Lorde was among the first theorists to write extensively on the way race and other characteristics impacted the focus of the feminist movement. She viewed the accepted narrative of man vs. woman as overly simplistic, and sought to gain recognition for the subcategories involved in both: race, class, sexual orientation, health, etc. Although she completed a master’s degree in library science, the bulk of her career was spent teaching English at various colleges and universities. Her decades of poetry earned her a space in one of Langston Hughes’ anthologies, and the title of State Poet of New York in the year before her death.

Lorde, in keeping with her theories, viewed her lesbianism as being a part of her identity inseparable from her work. As she put it: “Let me tell you first about what it was like being a Black woman poet in the ’60s, from jump. It meant being invisible. It meant being really invisible. It meant being doubly invisible as a Black feminist woman and it meant being triply indivisible as a Black lesbian and feminist.”