Alexis Pauline Gumbs

A Time Must-Read Book of the Year Winner of the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year Shortlisted for the 2025 Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize A bold, innovative biography that offers a new understanding of the life, work, and enduring impact of Audre Lorde. We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity-center walls. But even those who are inspired by Lorde’s teachings on “the creative power of difference” may be missing something fundamental about her life and work, and what they can mean for us today. Lorde’s understanding of survival was not simply about getting through to the other side of oppression or being resilient in the face of cancer. It was about the total stakes of what it means to be in relationship with a planet in transformation. Possibly the focus on Lorde’s quotable essays, to the neglect of her complex poems, has led us to ignore her deep engagement with the natural world, the planetary dynamics of geology, meteorology, and biology. For her, ecological images are not simply metaphors but rather literal guides to how to be of earth on earth, and how to survive—to live the ethics that a Black feminist lesbian warrior poetics demands. In Survival Is a Promise, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the first researcher to explore the full depths of Lorde’s manuscript archives, illuminates the eternal life of Lorde. Her life and work become more than a sound bite; they become a cosmic force, teaching us the grand contingency of life together on earth.

The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

Survival Is a Promise

Marion

But earlier in the same decade, June Jordan's stance in solidarity with Palestinian and Lebanese people, and the Jewish and Israeli peace activists who fought against Israeli imperialism and occupation, left her blacklisted by The New York Times, where she had written reviews for years. They refused to publish any of her opinion pieces. She organized an event called "Moving Towards Home" to raise money to send to UNICEF for victims of the massacres and bombings in Lebanon, but prominent voices in the literary community, including the director of the 92nd Street Y and the executive committee of PEN, spoke against the politics of the reading. After the reading itself, where june spoke last, a group of white men surrounded and threatened her. According to Jordan, someone at the reception said she should be "burned alive.”

In her essay "Life After Lebanon," Jordan chose to emphasize the women who stood up for her, the women who protected her from the men who surrounded her, the women who stood in solidarity with her.

She pointed out that those brave women were in the lineage of Fannie Lou Hamer, the Black feminist poet Alexis De Veaux, the white Jewish poet Kathy Engel, the Lebanese poet Etel Adnan, the founder of the Arab-American Feminist League Carol Haddad, and others. This time,

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