Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography - Hardcover

by Audre Lorde (Author), Evie Shockley (Foreword by), Melinda Goodman (Afterword by)

A new Penguin Vitae hardcover edition of Audre Lorde's trailblazing biomythography that cemented the poet's legacy as a leading voice in intersectional feminism and 20th century literature.

In her 1982 genre-fluid memoir, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Audre Lorde reflects on how her identity was formed by her relationships with women throughout her life, from her early memories of her mother attempting to shield her from the racism and sexism ingrained in American society to the solidarity she found in lesbian communities in downtown New York in the 1950s and among women whom she worked beside. With candor and trenchant yet simple detail, Lorde paints an intimate portrait of her life, granting readers a window into the formative experiences of one of the greatest writers and feminist thinkers of the 20th century. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name is the second Lorde title to be featured in the Penguin Vitae collection and features a new foreword by award-winning poet Evie Shockley.

Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Author Biography

A writer, activist, and mother of two, Audre Lorde grew up in 1930s Harlem. She earned a master's degree in library science from Columbia University, received a National Endowment for the Arts grant for poetry, and was New York State's poet laureate from 1991 to 1993. She is the author of twelve books, including Sister Outsider and The Black Unicorn. Lorde died of cancer at the age of fifty-eight in 1992.

Poet and scholar Evie Shockley has published four books of poetry, including suddenly we, which won an NAACP Image Award and was a National Book Award Finalist, and semiautomatic, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The 1619 Project, The Black Scholar, LitHub, The New Republic, and the Boston Review. A recipient of the Academy Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement and the Shelley Memorial Award, Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University.

Melinda Goodman has been an adjunct professor at the City University of New York since 1987 when she was chosen by Audre Lorde to take over Lorde's poetry workshops. Goodman was a member of the editorial collective of Conditions, the first international lesbian literary journal. Her writing has received awards from the Astraea Foundation, the Key West Literary Seminar, the New York Foundation on the Arts, and The Los Angeles Review. She is the 2025 winner of Wayne State University's Judith Siegel Pearson Award for poetry. Most recently, her work was published in Morning Writes, selections of writing by four older lesbian poets, available from SNAP! Press, a small independent press committed to publishing LGBTQ+, feminist, and community-centered writing.