Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind

10/18/2024

I enjoyed this conversation about Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde.💜

https://lareviewofbooks.org/av/alexis-pauline-gumbss-survival-is-a-promise-the-eternal-life-of-audre-lorde/

10/15/2024

New York Fam! Come through!!!!

Join us for a conversations with Alexis Pauline, author of Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

10/06/2024

I am so excited to be Faith Holsaert’s interlocutor cofacilitator cheerleader today for her new book’s coming out party!!!! Bring the fam and join us at Soul Sanctuary today at 5pm for a celebration of Malineal, Faith and our beloved Q***r Elders!!!!💜💜💜💜💜

10/01/2024

Here in North Carolina and in so many places impacted by storms and wars and chemical explosions we are thinking about our loved ones. We are thinking about you and everyone you love and everyone you live in solidarity with. In the light of all of this examining our definitions of love, our stories about love, the possibilities in our love hits different. But it feels just as urgent. We hope you will join us live in the darkness of the new moon period to engage these activities, but of course we are happy for you to engage them at the time that feels most supportive to you via the replay. As a reminder our Loveships and Lovebirds workshops are this week:

Tomorrow Oct 2 at 6pm EST “Make Love Powerful” an intention-setting workshop for people in committed partnerships to participate in together.

This Wednesday Oct 3 at 6pm EST “Like Tiger-lilies” an intention-setting workshop for people not currently in a committed partnership who are calling even more love into their lives.

Find out more and sign up for either workshop at this link: https://www.mobilehomecoming.org/loveship-workshops

These workshops are open to everyone and everyone who signs up will get access to the replay!

09/30/2024

“The Bountiful Legacy of a Bad Idea”
I got to write about the 40th anniversary of Audre Lorde’s SISTER OUTSIDER for Penguin Classics

💜💜💜

https://classics.penguin.co.uk/q/1cHdPjWpLSd3/wv

09/25/2024

I have always loved dear brother La Marr Jurelle Bruce ‘s thoughtful and lyrical writing. I’m so honored by the depth and beauty of this essay about Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. Here is “Promise Kept” La Marr’s latest for

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/1604564/promise-kept

La Marr you are my brother both through our shared commitment and our shared teachers. Cherished Farah Jasmine Griffin, divine Cheryll Greene, dear Steven Gregory and so many more. We are the children of Shay Byrd-Harris and the Institute for Research in African-American Studies-Columbia University.

And. The name ringing in my heart this morning is Marcellus. Because our unforgettable professor Marcellus Blount taught us that if we attend to the grammar of an utterance we will learn about the state of being it requires, produces and perpetuates. And now on the poem of this day we mourn another Marcellus. Marcellus Williams, innocent man whose state-sanctioned and state-fulfilled murder tells us everything we need to know about the state we are in. In a nation-state fluent only in the grammar of death and domination, in a nation-state that cannot speak justice, compassion or care we understand that the country that carried out an unjust death sentence against Marcellus writes its name in the same grammar when at Barnard and Columbia the very campuses where we studied, the administration engages fascist suppression of student protest. This is the grammar of a nation-state that supports genocide because genocide is its origin story. Its mother tongue.

This country cannot support anything other than a deadly formation without fundamentally changing the grammar of its own existence.

This is what Audre Lorde meant when she said “we were never meant to survive.” That we have “learned to be afraid with our mother’s milk.” She elucidated the repetitive grammars of fear so we could defy them.

This instant. This triumph.

It is better to speak.

And by “speak” she means we must all become poets forsaking the grammar of death that has taught us to be afraid. By “speak” she is saying that in this very moment we must generate a lexicon of revolutionary love. For every Marcellus. For all of us.

La Marr, I am grateful that you are my brother in this work. May we all keep the promise of our breathing.

09/17/2024

So much fun with the Black Mammalogists!!! You can watch the video here! The ASL interpretation was pure love!💜💜💜💜

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yttx9rTmgZo

08/26/2024

Folks keep asking me about the falling out between June Jordan and Audre Lorde. There are two chapters of Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde about this. But I wanted to make deep space to engage this with love.

You are welcome to join us Thursday for this week's reflective writing workshop, "in case you ever tried to reach me and i couldn't hear you": audre lorde, june jordan and the phone call that never was:

https://sangodare.podia.com/in-case-you-ever-tried-to-reach-me-and-i-couldn-t-hear-you-audre-lorde-june-jordan-and-the-phone-call-that-never-happened

08/26/2024

Are you working on a script? Check out the reboot of Black Feminist Film School’s step by step script development class. Sign up here and/or learn more about it on the IG live on Wednesday!

https://sangodare.podia.com/4b73e26b-3e41-45c4-a4d4-e27faa0079dd

08/26/2024

Thank you for this conversation Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. We talked about legacy, failure, wonder, solidarity, conflict and more in the context of Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde.💜

Audre Lorde may be gone, but her legacy lives on through her students, says author Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

08/23/2024

Proud of Ruwa Romman who honored Fannie Lou Hamer in the speech she should have been able to give at the DNC. This group poem comes from the multitude of is who agree with Hamer’s mandate. “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free!”

This week over a hundred people decided to turn our faces away from the people the two major parties representing so-called democracy have foolishly offered as examples of leadership in these times and turn our faces, our hearts and our minds to two actual examples of leadership Ella Baker and Fanni

08/16/2024

Last night was a portal opener.💜 Thank you beloved Adrienne Maree Brown Prentis Patrice Hemphill Hayti Heritage Center Regulator Bookshop and the whole AK Press team.

Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde is best understood in the context of the genius of this community. adrienne’s work, prentis’s work. the work of SpiritHouse NC and the enduring love of Durham, NC.

Love is a promise. You can watch the video here:

https://www.youtube.com/live/iYBP41spQuo?si=k33JXG3vHg3o7zsv