She didn't speak until she was four. When she finally did, she thought in poetry and when people asked how she was, she answered in it. By the time she was twelve, she couldn't find poems that said what she needed to say, so she started writing her own.

In 1979, she walked into a feminist conference and told the room - mostly white women who considered themselves her allies - that the movement they'd built couldn't free her, because it had been built on the same exclusions it claimed to be fighting. "The master's tools," she said, "will never dismantle the master's house." She enraged a great many people that day. She also changed the way movements think about power, difference, and who gets left out when liberation is defined too narrowly.