Alexis Pauline Gumbs Speaks on Her New Audre Lorde Biography

Alexis Pauline Gumbs 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.

Her poetry and fiction appears in many creative journals and has been honored with inclusion in Best American Experimental Writing, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and honors from the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and the Firefly Ridge Women of Color Award. She has been poet-in-residence at Make/Shift Magazine and is currently Creative Writing Editor at Feminist Studies.

She is the founder of Brilliance Remastered, an online network and series of retreats and online intensives serving community accountable intellectuals and artists in the legacies of Audre Lorde's profound statement in "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" that the preceding statement is "only threatening to those…who still think of the master's house as their only source of support." Through retreats on ancestor accountable intellectual practice, and online courses on topics from anger as a resource to transnational intellectual solidarity Alexis and her Brilliance Remastered collaborators have nurtured a community of thinkers and artists grounded in the resources that normative institutions ignore.

Her most recent book Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (FSG) has been named a Publisher's Weekly Top 10 book of 2024, A Time Magazine must read book of 2024, a Guardian book of the week and was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal in Nonfiction.