Survival is a Promise

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

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In addition to being one of our greatest living poets, Gumbs is perhaps our most knowledgeable expert on Audre Lorde’s life and work

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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

Robin D. G. Kelley, 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'

Brittney Cooper, 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

Terry Tempest Williams, 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

Stella Bolaki, 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

Nitasha Kaul, 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

Merlin Sheldrake, author of Entangled Life

A feast for the intellect -- and the soul

Publisher's Weekly, Starred Review

A scholarly lovesong to the power and wonder of words … Imaginative, poetic and inspirational, Survival is a Promise is a burst of light. A spell-binding account of Audre Lorde's life, work and legacy

Emma Parker

Innovative … Gumbs disintegrates, rearranges and examines all the matter that created Lorde, enabling her to unearth the many layers of feeling evoked by her lesser known poetry … Survival is a Promise shows us the kind of complex and radiant scholarship that emerges when scholars dig deeper, refusing to treat the life and work of Black feminist figures as self-evident

Lola Olufemi, Guardian

An award-winning poet, writer, feminist and activist in her own right, Gumbs is among the first researchers to delve into Lorde’s manuscript archives. The resulting book highlights the late author’s commitment to interrogating what it means to survive on this planet—and how Lorde’s radical understanding of ecology can guide us today

NPR

Masterful … Gumbs’ writing is multilayered, poetic and beautiful, making this book more than a biography. It’s a meeting of two minds … Survival Is a Promise bears an important and hopeful message for us all: Survival is a communal act of care

Catherine Hollis, BookPage

The American writer, poet and civil rights activist Audre Lorde was an incredible human being and this book, which focuses on her life and work, is truly special

Elif Shafak, The Times