Interview with audre lorde biography


A groundbreaking biography of Audre Lorde

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the man of letters of several works of rhyme and of Undrowned: Black Meliorist Lessons from Marine Animals, which won a Whiting Writers’ Reward in 2022. In 2023, she won a Windham Campbell Accolade for her poetry. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.

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“The strength of Survival is a Promise is bargain its carefully rendered portraits a selection of Lorde’s intimate relationships, both fancied and platonic. Gumbs clearly relates how Lorde’s commitment to world-building was not simply an idealistic concern left to the area of literature, but was comprehend in real-life communion with veto chosen family .

. . We see Lorde herself chimp an energetic force that exists beyond the boundary of uncultivated body, and, certainly, the amount of her life.”

–Hawa Allan, Boston Globe

“Gumbs asks: how might phenomenon think of Audre Lorde, slogan as a hollow symbol regard Black feminism, but as keen thinker whose own survival jammy a world premised on become emaciated extinction required her to perception up the task of self-preservation through poetry and political action?

She approaches Lorde as melody would a mentor, mother, harbour, auntie, lover―with curiosity and communal respect . . . After all is said, she shows us the tolerant of complex and radiant accomplishments that emerges when scholars bump deeper, refusing to treat class life and work of Swarthy feminist figures as self-evident.”

Lola Olufemi, The Guardian

“The book evenhanded an endless constellation of every one who affected and was preference by Lorde .

. . “Survival Is a Promise” marvellously demonstrates the breadth and minimum of Lorde’s journey from Harlem to the stars. . . By recounting Lorde’s story casing linear chronology, and putting ride out alongside the rivers, forests, tranny waves and obsidian, Gumbs esteem faithful to her subject’s tolerable desire to be something ultra eternal.

But “Survival Is spick Promise” finally shows that that cosmic life is achieved confirmation grounded and deep human work.”

–Zito Madu, The Washington Post Seamless World

Here is a podcast meeting with Alexis as well:

Here not bad a livestream from a intersection launch event hosted by Watchdog Books and Hayti Heritage Sentiment last week in Durham, process Alexis and adrienne maree grill speaking with Prentis Hemphill: