

Dudley Randall, a poet and critic, asserted in his review of the book that Lorde "does not wave a black flag, but her blackness is there, implicit, in the bone." Her first volume of poetry, The First Cities (1968), was published by the Poet's Press and edited by Diane di Prima, a former classmate and friend from Hunter College High School.


During this time, she was politically active in civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements. Lorde's poetry was published very regularly during the 1960s - in Langston Hughes' 1962 New Negro Poets, USA in several foreign anthologies and in black literary magazines. Audre Lorde was a revolutionary Black feminist.
