Audre Lorde, the poet and civil rights activist, was a black lesbian and feminist who lived with her partner Frances Clayton and Lorde's two children on Staten Island between 1972 and 1987. The house is where she wrote her autobiography, "Zami: A New Spelling of My Name." Clayton gave up her tenured position at Brown University after Lorde's ex-husband refused to let the children live outside of New York. Their relationship ended in 1989 three years before Lorde died of cancer. The New York State Poet Laureate, she called herself a "black feminist lesbian mother poet."