We’ve been thrilled by the early reviews and coverage for Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, which will be published tomorrow by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US, and by Allen Lane in the UK. (Alexis wrote in an Instagram post, “I’m grateful that so many reviewers seem as curious about the form of this work as they are about the content of Audre Lorde’s eternal life.”) Charis will host a special event tomorrow in Atlanta, at the Auburn Avenue Research Library, with Alexis in conversation with Carlin Rushing.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the author of several works of poetry and of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals, which won a Whiting Writers’ Award in 2022. In 2023, she won a Windham Campbell Prize for her poetry. She lives in Durham, North Carolina. X | Instagram
“The strength of Survival is a Promise is in its carefully rendered portraits of Lorde’s intimate relationships, both romantic and platonic. Gumbs clearly relates how Lorde’s commitment to world-building was not simply an abstract concern left to the domain of literature, but was realized in real-life communion with her chosen family . . . We see Lorde herself as an energetic force that exists beyond the boundary of her body, and, certainly, the span of her life.”
–Hawa Allan, Boston Globe
“Gumbs asks: how might we think of Audre Lorde, not as a hollow symbol of Black feminism, but as a thinker whose own survival in a world premised on her extinction required her to take up the task of self-defense through poetry and political action? She approaches Lorde as one would a mentor, mother, sister, auntie, lover―with curiosity and mutual respect . . . Ultimately, she shows us the kind of complex and radiant scholarship that emerges when scholars dig deeper, refusing to treat the life and work of Black feminist figures as self-evident.”
―Lola Olufemi, The Guardian
“The book is an endless constellation of everyone who affected and was affected by Lorde . . . “Survival Is a Promise” admirably demonstrates the breadth and depth of Lorde’s journey from Harlem to the stars. . . By recounting Lorde’s story outside linear chronology, and putting her alongside the rivers, forests, radio waves and obsidian, Gumbs is faithful to her subject’s great desire to be something more eternal. But “Survival Is a Promise” finally shows that this cosmic life is achieved through grounded and deep human work.”
–Zito Madu, The Washington Post Book World
Here is a podcast interview with Alexis as well:
Here is a livestream from a joint launch event hosted by Regulator Books and Hayti Heritage Center last week in Durham, with Alexis and adrienne maree brown speaking with Prentis Hemphill: