Reviewed Work: Conversations with Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde, Joan Wylie Hall

Excerpt

Joan Wylie Hall teaches at the University of Mississippi and is the author of Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction (1993). In her latest project, Conversations with Audre Lorde , Hall compiles a range of primary documents that feature Lorde in various forms of "conversation," during which she discusses her life and her work. The collection includes some of Lorde's better-known interviews with such prominent literary figures as Charles Rowell, Adrienne Rich, and Claudia Tate. However, Hall also includes some more obscure documents, such as the transcription of a radio program aired in 1987 and translations of interviews originally recorded in German. Hall suggests that her anthology has been shaped by Lorde's recurrent reference to the notion of displacement as a defining characteristic of Lorde's life, and so readers may approach these "conversations" as Lorde's efforts to traverse the numerous gaps that contribute to her status as an outsider.