Read about Alexis Pauline Gumbs In anticipation of our event on Monday 11th November.

Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the author of four books including Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. She is a self-professed queer Black feminist love evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all life. In her work, she aims to facilitate infinite, unstoppable ancestral love in practice.

Through works spanning diverse genres, Gumbs has transformed the scope of intellectual, creative and oracular writing with experimental works like Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity in 2016, M Archive: After the End of the World in 2018 and Dub: Finding Ceremony in 2020.  Publisher’s Weekly calls their writing “groundbreaking.”

Her latest book, Survival Is A Promise, is a Guardian and LitHub most anticipated book of 2024. A deeply researched and impressionistic biography of one of the most iconic figures of 20th-century Black, queer, and feminist thought, Survival Is A Promise is a love letter to Lorde, pushing past her broad circulation in social media memes, inspirational quotes, and other forms of contemporary iconography. The book locates the tectonic forces Lorde at once brought into view and moved through herself.

Gumbs has a track record of support and collaboration. She received a 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize Winner in Poetry, 2022 Whiting Award in Nonfiction and a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Prose. They were also a 2020-2021 National Humanities Center Fellow. Gumbs holds a PhD in English, African and African American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University and is the co-founder of Black Feminist Film School, an initiative to screen, study, and produce films with a Black feminist ethic. 

Black feminist community-building is a motivation across Gumbs’ work and a key theme in Survival Is A Promise. In an interview with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore for Truthout, she says: “Polyvocality is crucial to survival. Because survival is not individual. It is collective… Audre knew the secret to eternal life: Let your voice offer other people their own truer, stronger voice.”

Praise for Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

“Gumbs is a master stylist with a knack for writing sentences at once direct and expansive (“The scale of the life of the poet is the scale of the universe”). This is a feast for the intellect—and the soul.” – Tanya McKinnon

“an elegant portrait of a revered and beloved icon and an essential addition for library collections.” – Allison Escoto

“Lorde has found the perfect interlocutor. Gumbs’ writing is multilayered, poetic and beautiful, making this book more than a biography. It’s a meeting of two minds.” – Catherine Hollis

Read an excerpt here.

Join Alexis and Writers Read on Monday, November 11th, 2024, 7pm, Room MB-09, 1600 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W. 

Dr. Gumbs will be introduced by Dr. Amber Rose Johnston, a scholar, artist, and spacemaker from Providence, RI, whose interdisciplinary practice explores experimental poetics and performance as critical methods for reconfiguring our worlds. 

This event is free and open to all. Registration required – sign up here. The reading will be followed by a book signing. Copies of Survival Is a Promise will be available to purchase at the event via Argo Books.