Title: The Cancer Journals
First published: June 1, 2000
Description: First published over forty years ago, The Cancer Journals is a startling, powerful account of Audre Lorde’s experience with breast cancer and mastectomy. Long before narratives explored the silences around illness and women’s pain, Lorde questioned the rules of conformity for women’s body images and supported the need to confront physical loss not hidden by prosthesis. 

Living as a “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” Lorde heals and re-envisions herself on her own terms and offers her voice, grief, resistance, and courage to those dealing with their own diagnosis. Poetic and profoundly feminist, Lorde’s testament gives visibility and strength to women with cancer to define themselves, and to transform their silence into language and action.
Subjects: Cancer, Diaries, Poets, American, American Poets, Patients, Breast, Biography, LGBTQ biography and memoir, Internal medicine, Stonewall Book Awards, LGBTQ diaries, Cancer, patients, biography, Breast, cancer, Breast Neoplasms, Psychology, Survivors, Brustkrebs, Erlebnisbericht, Schriftstellerin, MEDICAL / Internal Medicine, Poetry as Topic, Personal narratives, Modern Literature, Medicine in Literature, collection:stonewall_book_award=pre-1990_winner
Places: United States
People: Audre Lorde
Time periods: 20th century