Alexis Pauline Gumbs on Audre Lorde’s The Black Unicorn
In Conversation for the Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast features a series of conversations with the 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize winners about their favorite books. Hosted by Michael Kelleher.
In this episode, poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs joins Windham-Campbell Prizes Director Michael Kelleher to talk about the beauty of Audre Lorde’s poetry and why more people should know her as a poet as well as an essayist.
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From the episode:
Alexis Pauline Gumbs: Audre Lorde is a cosmic force. Audre Lorde was a science nerd and a science fiction addict. ‘Science fiction addict’ is her own phrase, that she used from a young age and the imagery in her poetry, of sand, of volcanoes, of stones, is not actually purely metaphorical. She really was interested in Earth and our relationship with earth literally.
And she was like, studying stones and all of this geology and reading all of this science literature for her entire life and I don’t think people recognize that. In so many interviews, she talks about us having, yes, to understand the creative power of difference in our relationships with each other. But, she says, if we don’t shift our relationship to this planet, we won’t even be able to have these conversations because we will not be able to exist. And I don’t think that people think about Audre Lorde as an environmentalist or as an eco-feminist or as a science nerd, really.
But she really was her whole life, like from childhood to the moment that she took her last breath, she was thinking about meteors. She was reading up on what caused these rocks to form out of the earth. I really want people to be able to have a conversation, I want people to think about Audre Lorde and that the fact that they should read Audre Lorde’s poetry to think about what to do about our climate crisis, and they should read Audre Lorde’s poetry to think about what it means to be in relationship with this planet at this time.
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Reading list:
The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde • Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde • The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir • Broadside Press • “A Supermarket in California!” by Allen Ginsberg
For a full episode transcript, click here.
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Born in Summit, New Jersey in 1982, Alexis Pauline Gumbs is an activist, critic, poet, scholar, and educator. A self-described “Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist,” Gumbs uses hybrid forms to re-envision old narratives and engage with the history of Black intellectual-imaginative work. Her four books of prose-poetry include Dub: Finding Ceremony (2020), Undrowned (2020), M Archive (2018), and Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (2016). Dub, M Archive, and Spill form a kind of triptych, each engaging with the work of a Black woman theorist: Sylvia Wynter in Dub; M. Jacqui Alexander in M Archive; and Hortense Spillers in Spill.
In all her work, Gumbs raises the stakes of literature within and beyond the page. She is a people’s poet, awake to the form’s capacity to imagine alternative worlds, across and through time. Her worldview is capacious and paradigm-shifting, speaking to urgent realities with exuberant love, and inviting activists, artists, and readers alike to join in her participatory presentations. A graduate of Barnard College and Duke University, Gumbs is also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (2022), a Whiting Award (2022), and a National Humanities Center Fellowship (2020). She lives in Durham, North Carolina, and is currently at work on a biography of Audre Lorde.
The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
