Alexis Pauline Gumbs (she/her) is a Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all sentient beings. Her work in this lifetime is to facilitate infinite, unstoppable ancestral love in practice. Her poetic work in response to the needs of her cherished communities has held space for multitudes in mourning and movement. Alexis’s co-edited volume Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (PM Press, 2016) has shifted the conversation on mothering, parenting and queer transformation. Alexis has transformed the scope of intellectual, creative and oracular writing with her triptych of experimental works published by Duke University Press (Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity in 2016, M Archive: After the End of the World in 2018 and Dub: Finding Ceremony, 2020.) Unlike most academic texts, Alexis’s work has inspired artists across form to create dance works, installation work, paintings, processionals, divination practices, operas, quilts and more.

Alexis was a 2020-2021 National Humanities Center Fellow, funded by the Founders Award, and is a 2022 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. Her recent book Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (FSG) was awarded the ZORA (formerly the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award) in Non-fiction and the Judy Grahn prize in Lesbian Non-fiction by Publishing Triangle. It was also named a Publisher’s Weekly Top 10 book of 2024, a Time Magazine must read book and was a finalist for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize and the LA Times Book Prize.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Milkweed Editions
• A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, by Erin Sharkey
• Audre Lorde
• Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
• The Loft
• Fall of the Berlin Wall
• St. Croix
• Dagmar Schultz
• Audre Lorde — The Berlin Years
• The Feminist Wire
• Aisha Shahidah Simmons
• Dr. Heidi R. Lewis
• Toni Cade Bambara
• Jamaica
• Anguilla
• Oracles
• Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals
• The Book of Kin: On Absence, Love, and Being There, by Jennifer Eli Bowen (Milkweed Editions, 2025)
• Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home, by Chris La Tray

Prompt for Writing and/or Living

Find a stone and turn it into a gift, whatever that means to you.