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.

Carolyn Finney, PhD is a storyteller, author, and cultural geographer. A Fulbright Scholar, a Canon National Parks Science Scholar, and recipient of a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Environmental Studies, she has served on the U.S. National Parks Advisory Board, and has held positions at Wellesley College, the University of California, Berkeley , as well as the University of Kentucky. She was awarded the Alexander and Ilse Melamid Medal from the American Geographical Society. She has published pieces in BESIDE, The Guardian, and the New York Times and has essays published in the anthologies Nature Swagger: Stories and Visions of Black Joy in the Outdoors (edited by Rue Mapp, November, 2022) and A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars (edited by Erin Sharkey). Her first book, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors, was released in 2014.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Milkweed Editions
• A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, by Erin Sharkey
• The Artist’s Way
• The Acreage at Osceola
• Horst Rechelbacher
• Priscilla Solis Ybarra
• Hayden Planetarium
• Sylvia’s
• An Inconvenient Truth
• LGBTQ culture in the Philippines
• Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home, by Chris La Tray

Prompt for Writing and/or Living

What are the rules you imagine in a place that you’ve spent time in, that you’ve visited, but most importantly, in a place that you’ve loved?

Ronald L. Greer II is a writer and poet whose work appears in A Darker Wilderness: An Anthology of Black Nature Writing (Milkweed Press). His poems and stories have appeared in Doors Adjacent and Night Colors, among others. He’s the 2019 Pamela J. Caligiuri Broadside Award Winner and Co-editor of American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion, publishing in November 2023 (Coffee House Press). Greer spent his formative years in Detroit nurturing his grandfather’s urban garden.

Mentioned in the episode:

MCF-Moose Lake

Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop (MPWW)

Stillwater Writer’s Collective

Nature in Detroit

Pit bulls

Rattlesnakes

Spider monkeys

A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, by Erin Sharkey (Milkweed Editions)

Aster of Ceremonies, by JJJJJerome Ellis (Milkweed Editions) - Aster of Ceremonies (audiobook)