Alexis Pauline Gumbs with Cara Page: Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

​Author Alexis Pauline Gumbs joins us to discuss her new book, Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, with Cara Page.

This event will take place in person at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library on the 7th Floor.

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.

At this event, author Alexis Pauline Gumbs will discuss her new book with Cara Page.

To join the event in person | Doors will open 30 minutes before the program begins. For free events, we generally overbook to ensure a full house. Priority will be given to those who have registered in advance, but registration does not guarantee admission. All registered seats are released shortly before start time, and seats may become available at that time. A standby line will form 30 minutes before the program.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the author of several works of poetry and of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals, which won a Whiting Writers' Award in 2022. In 2023, she won a Windham Campbell Prize for her poetry. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Cara Page is a Black Queer Feminist cultural memory worker & organizer. For the past 30+ years, she has organized with LGBTQI+/Black, Indigenous & People of Color liberation movements in the US & Global South at the intersections of racial, gender & economic justice, reproductive & transformative justice. She is also a co-architect of the healing justice political framework as the Founding Coordinator of the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective. She is currently the Founder & Cultural Organizing Director of Changing Frequencies, an abolitionist organizing project that designs cultural memory work to disrupt harms and violence from the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC). She is also co founder of the Healing Histories Project, which deepens and expands relationships with abolitionist healers/health practitioners, community organizers, researchers/historians & cultural workers to interrupt the medical industrial complex and harmful systems of care. Cara is a co-editor, with Erica Woodland, of the anthology, Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care & Safety (North Atlantic Books, 2023); and co-producer of the HJ Lineages Listening & Cultural Memory Tour.

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ACCESSIBILITY NOTES

In-Person

• Assistive listening devices and/or hearing loops are available at the venue.


• You can request a free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation or CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) captioning service by emailing your request at least two weeks in advance of the event: email accessibility@nypl.org or use this Gmail template.


• This venue is fully accessible to wheelchairs.

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All programs are subject to change or cancellation. 

The 7 Stories Up Series at SNFL is made possible by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).