Zami: A New Spelling of My Name is a memoir by Audre Lorde, Black feminist poet and theorist. It was published in 1982 at a time when other feminist writers and critics were thinking about the relationships women had with each other (rather than exclusively focusing on relationships between men and women). Zami stands out from many of these other texts because it is what Lorde called “a biomythography, which is really fiction. It has elements of biography and history and myth. In other words, it’s fiction built from many sources. This is one way of expanding our vision.”
Zami is also Lorde’s coming-out story. She writes in detail how she came to know herself as a lesbian and how she...