Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, born in 1982 in New Jersey, moved with her family to south Florida. At age 14, they moved to Atlanta, where Alexis attended high school and subsequently joined Charis Books & More’s Young Women’s Writing Group. During that time, Alexis wrote for Vox Teen Communications. She attended Barnard College at Columbia University, later earning her PhD in English, African and African-American studies, and women and gender studies at Duke University (2010) in Durham, North Carolina.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs has edited one collection, Revolutionary Mothering; and she has written three books that are her Black feminist triptych: Spill (inspired by Hortense Spillers, 2016), M Archive (inspired by M. Jacqui Alexander, 2018), and Finding Ceremony (inspired by Sylvia Wynter, 2020). Her fourth book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, won the 2022 Whiting Award in Nonfiction. The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde: Biography as Ceremony, Gumb’s fifth book, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
While in graduate school at Duke University, Alexis began an ongoing project that she calls the “Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind,” focused on Black and African American women. This project includes her Mobile Homecoming Project, which has some similarities to our SLFAHP, and which includes her Black Feminist Bookmobile Project. These projects have blossomed and expanded into other projects that celebrate intergenerational Black LGBTQ brilliance.
Alexis is widely and exuberantly celebrated. She has been recognized by the Advocate’s 40 under 40 list, the UTNE Reader’s 50 Visionaries Transforming the World list, the Bitch 50, Colorlines LGBTQ Leaders Transforming the South list, the Too Sexy For 501-C3 award, and more for her work with the Mobile Homecoming Project. She is a Lucille Clifton Honoree, Firefly Ridge Honoree, and Pushcart Prize Nominee. Recent awards include the 2022 Whiting Award in Nonfiction, the 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Award, and the 2021 National Humanities Center Fellowship.
See also:
Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s conversation with Hortense Spillers on Left of Black
Biographical information, works, projects, and inspirations of Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Communiqué to White Ally Heaven, Sinister Wisdom 87 (Tribute to Adrienne Rich – Fall 2012): 86-100.
Dub: Finding Ceremony, Duke University Press, 2020.
Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind
Evidence, a contribution to Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, AK Press, 2015.
An introduction to M Archive: After the End of the World, Duke University Press.
Excerpts from the echolocation lecture by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of M Archive: After the End of the World, Evergreen Art Lecture Series, 2017.
Exhale. Collage by Alexis Pauline Gumbs for Toni Cade Bambara based on a photograph by Susan Ross.
Honeypot (contributor), Duke University Press, 2019.
M Archive: After the End of the World, Duke University Press, 2018.
Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, PM Press, 2016.
Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, Duke University Press, 2016.
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, AK Press, 2020.
Video: “A Homemade Field of Love,” The Poetry Project, 2021.
The concept behind Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s current project, “Visionary Daughtering”
who breathes with me, BrokenBeautiful Press.
Without Apology: Poems in Honor of Black Women by Clyde E. Gumbs, Blurb, 2016.