Survival is a Promise

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

A Guardian and Lit Hub most anticipated book of 2024

Read these chapters like a collection of poems that speak in chorus in all directions. Understand each word as an opportunity for Audre’s fierce love, which is the same love that birthed the volcanoes and split the continents, to reach you, wherever you are.

Audre Lorde was a survivor: of childhood disability injustice, of her best friend’s suicide, of the atomic age. She was a college activist against nuclear arms. A mother who knew poetry could help her children survive a racist world. And, ultimately, a cancer survivor, who understood the war going on within her cells was connected to the struggle against oppression taking place all around her.

This stunning new account of Lorde’s life and work illuminates how, for Lorde, survival was not simply about getting through, or about resilience. It was about how to live on, and with, a planet in transformation. Lorde’s commitment to justice was intimately connected to her deep engagement with the natural world; with the planetary dynamics of geology, meteorology, and biology. For Lorde, ecological images are not simply metaphors but rather literal guides to how to be on earth, and how to live fully as a Black feminist lesbian warrior poet.

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 Audre Lorde. Her life and work swell to become a cosmic force, showing us the grand possibility of life together on earth.


©2024 Alexis Pauline Gumbs (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

An exhilarating account of the feminist and civil rights pioneer Audre Lorde and what she can teach us about navigating today’s fraught politics, from poet and activist Gumbs
Guardian - 2024 Books to Watch
In addition to being one of our greatest living poets, Gumbs is perhaps our most knowledgeable expert on Audre Lorde’s life and work
Lit Hub - Most Anticipated Books of 2024
Only Alexis Pauline Gumbs could have written Audre Lorde's life story in seven dimensions. She is Lorde's spiritual daughter, and Survival Is a Promise is no mere biography - it is a communion, an ancestral divination, a long, intimate walk in which history, poetry, politics and wisdom are passed to a new generation
author of Freedom of Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Alexis Pauline Gumbs has been a kindred keeper of Audre Lorde's lesbian warrior poet legacy for nearly two decades. This long-overdue and yet right-on-time biography of the Lorde caresses and transgresses the limits of genre, to care for all the women and girls that Audre Lorde ever was or hoped to be. Nobody tends to Black Girls' stories like Gumbs, who takes Black women deadly, rigorously seriously. This book is a study in mastery of forms, with the kind of sacred irreverence that makes clear who the real geniuses always were. I read this book and could hear the Lorde saying, 'And it was good'
author of the New York Times bestseller, Eloquent Rage
Survival Is a Promise is a lightning strike of a biography on The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. It is poetic in form, political in scope, and revelatory in understanding Lorde's divine relationship to the earth as an ecological thinker. Alexis Pauline Gumbs has created a community of poetic ancestors, including June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, and Fannie Lou Hamer, now eternal sisters with whom she stands alongside in a circle of relationships. Gumbs describes the work of Audre Lorde as 'a black archive of buried photosynthesis.' In her hands, it is pure light in the vitality of the struggle. This singular volume is a force field of love full of prophetic dreaming animating not only what is possible but necessary. Power lives in this book. Chapter by stunning chapter, this spiritual biography made me want to be braver in voice and spirit
writer-in-residence, Harvard Divinity School
A passionate and loving evocation of an extraordinary life, Survival is a Promise is moving and inspiring. Alexis Pauline Gumbs conjures up her subject with imagination and inventiveness, producing a portrait of Audre Lorde that is rich and resonant
Emily Jeremiah
This is the one book I would take with me to my desert Island. I would survive on the nectar of Gumbs rich dark earthy prose and drink in the sweet pain of Lorde's blackness so I can see the hopeful dawn of her fierce love on the horizon and know I will be saved. That's the promise of this book
Heidi Safia Mirza
With Survival is a Promise Alexis Pauline Gumbs has succeeded in crafting a multi-faceted diamond of a biography lovingly tracing the shape of Lorde’s impact upon this earth, her eternal life. Dazzling like a burst of light, nurturing like a gray whale and fierce like a hurricane, this book is a gift of “well-researched wonder” that deftly holds close possibility, imagination, questioning and the sensuality of the archive. I dare you to read it and not recognise that Lorde’s story is inseparable from the story of all life, even yours
co-editor of Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies
Alexis Pauline Gumb's book is a powerful and poetic affirmation of Lorde's defiant life and work, re-membered now through a shapeshifting cloud of connexions with people, ideas, places, objects, feelings. You can begin reading this fiercely imaginative text on any page and be drawn into the radical and urgent promise of survival in the face of political and planetary troubles that haunt us still
Professor of Politics, International Relations, and Critical Interdisciplinary Studies
A life-giving enquiry into the visionary Audre Lorde. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, an extraordinary poet, composes this remarkable work from many growing tips that tangle and entwine. Flowing through this adventure is a vital pulse of insight: Poetry is woven through our flesh and is fundamental to the way we think, feel, imagine, heal, and transform. Gumbs’s breathtaking telling of Lorde is an intimate guide to some of poetry's most fierce and tender powers
author of Entangled Life

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