Join award-winning authors Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Nikky Finney for a riveting discussion of Gumbs’ latest book, Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux this August. Personal and researched, this book explores Audre Lorde’s life, writing, and ethos with unprecedented access to Lorde’s own copies of the books Lorde wrote–gifts sent to Gumbs in 2018 by Lorde’s partner, Dr. Gloria Joseph, who inscribed each book, “To Alexis, In Memory of Audre." What makes Survival Is a Promise an essential book for anyone interested in learning more from Audre Lorde today is Gumbs’s attentiveness to and emphasis on how Lorde’s poetry speaks to themes of ecology and interdependence, revealing in her work an underexamined but deep engagement with the natural world. Event will be followed by a book signing. Books for sale by Letters Bookshop.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde is a queer Black feminist love evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all life. Publisher’s Weekly calls her writing “groundbreaking.” She is also the author of four earlier books aka portable textual ceremonies, including Undrowned which won the 2022 Whiting Award in Non-Fiction. A recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize in Poetry, the National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a National Humanities Center Fellowship, Dr. Gumbs lives and loves in Durham, North Carolina.

Nikky Finney

Nikky Finney is the author of On Wings Made of Gauze; Rice; The World Is Round; and Head Off & Split, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2011. Her new collection of poems, Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, was released in 2020. Finney is Carolina Distinguished Professor at USC in Columbia where she is also Director of the Ernest A. Finney Jr. Cultural Arts Center.

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