Red Emma’s

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.

“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 where history, poetry, politics, and wisdom are passed to a new generation.”—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

"[A] scintillating tour de force . . . in a free-ranging style as distinctive as its subject . . . Forgoing the strictures and linearity of traditional biography, Gumbs enlivens her narrative with unconventional flourishes that in lesser hands might feel like a gimmick but here come across as revelation . . . Gumbs is a master stylist with a knack for writing sentences at once direct and expansive (“The scale of the life of the poet is the scale of the universe”). This is a feast for the intellect—and the soul." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"An endless constellation of everyone who affected and was affected by Lorde . . . Survival is a Promise admirably demonstrates the breadth and depth of Lorde’s journey from Harlem to the stars . . . By recounting Lorde’s story outside linear chronology, and putting her alongside the rivers, forests, radio waves and obsidian, Gumbs is faithful to her subject’s great desire to be something more eternal. But Survival is a Promise finally shows that this cosmic life is achieved through grounded and deep human work." —The Washington Post

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.

Danielle Evans is the author of the story collections The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. Her first collection won the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright award for fiction, and the Paterson Prize for fiction; her second won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and The Bridge Book Award and was a finalist for The Aspen Prize, The Story Prize, and The LA Times Book prize for fiction. She is the 2021 winner of The New Literary Project Joyce Carol Oates Prize, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and a 2011 National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree. Her stories have appeared in magazines including The Paris Review, A Public Space, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, The Sewanee Review, and Phoebe, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2008, 2010, 2017, and 2018, and in _New Stories From The South. _She received an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, previously taught creative writing at American University in Washington DC and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and currently teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.