Books That Inspire 2005
 
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
Audre Lorde


Sister Outsider, by Audre Lorde, was the first book that spoke to me as a girl of color growing up invisible in the South and the Midwest during the 1980s. It validated me as an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual subject. It gave me the words to break my own silences. And it gave me the theoretical framework to begin linking those personal silences to larger forms of inequality that have structured the experiences of people who systematically have been denied the freedoms upon which this country was founded.
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Jane Park
Assistant Professor
Honors College