All posts by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
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Black Lives and Dark Matter: Calculating Possibility
A Review of Hidden Human Computers: The Black Women of NASA By Sue Bradford Edwards and Duchess Harris JD, PhD I’m a black feminist...
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One Thing: Toni Cade Bambara in the Speaking Everyday
So when The Salt Eaters or any of Toni Cade Bambara’s life-saving works fall off my bookshelf, or a scene from her literary creation shows...
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a spell to save your life
Alexis Pauline Gumbs: eat salt not that ocean drowning snack to stop thinking about dying unintentional salt
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Dismantle: Let Me Break It Down
A Review of Dismantle: An Anthology of Writing from the VONA/Voices Writing Workshop ed. Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela (Philadelphia: Thread Makes Blanket Press 2014) The first anthology of creative...
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“Dangerous girl. The dream of my life.”: Nadia Abou-Karr’s The Iconoclast: Revolutionary Love Poems
Right now I am growing more dangerous. I am growing into a woman who expresses her needs. I am not expressing my needs to make...
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One Thing: Toni Cade Bambara in the Speaking Everyday
Toni Cade Bambara is a life saver. Expert on Black women’s creative and spiritual practice, Akasha Gloria Hull says that Bambara’s enduring work The Salteaters induces...
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Love Poem Legacies: Activating Collective Erotic Power in the Name of the Lorde
Sometimes it comes down to the pronouns. When Audre Lorde first tried to publish “Love Poem” in her 1973 collection From a Land Where...
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Laboring Positions: Black Women, Mothering and the Academy (A conversation with editor Sekile Nzinga-Johnson)
Sekile Nzinga-Johnson is a BADDDDD sista in the Sonia Sanchez sense. She is a mother, educator, scholar, ruler of the roller derby scene as Malice...
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it’s like this: an interview with Doris Davenport
Doris Davenport’s crucial journey as an artist and thinker has spanned many years and has touched the nation (you may for example remember her piece...
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Can’t/ Don’t/Stop
Can’t/Don’t/Stop: Black Dance in America for Bert Williams, Aida “Queen of the Cakewalk” Overton Walker and George Walker you don’t see the stretch you...
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The Universe Loves You!: Dear Universe: Letters of Affirmation and Empowerment for All of Us by Yolo Akili
Did you know that my mom is a therapist? She is! And at it’s very best psychology is the science of learning how to love...
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Here
for Assata Amira Nakati Carter-Goff on her tenth birthday call down the name freedom call up the spirit of no matter what now call...
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how time passes now, how space changes here: Black Feminist Calculus and A Review of R. Erica Doyle’s Proxy
Months ago, I was sitting in a Laotian restaurant talking about the possibility of Black Feminist Calculus with the brilliant mathematician and carpenter Maia Boudreaux...
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The Place of Our Spines: An Inter/Review of nomad of salt and hard water by Cynthia Dewi Oka
“Poems come to stand in the place of our spines.” -Cynthia Dewi Oka “notes on Captain Ahab’s workshop/ before the poet is harpooned” We are...
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The Shape of My Impact
Sounds to Me Like A Promise: On Survival (After Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years by Dagmaar Schultz) “I love the word survival, it always sounds...
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In Praise of the Never Straight: Cheryl Clarke
In 1982, Black Lesbian Feminist Poet and Scholar Cheryl Clarke wrote a letter to her fellow Black Feminist Poet June Jordan: “No there is nothing...
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We Have Always Known: Embodying Community Accountability
A review of Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence, a special issue of Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order (Vol 37, No. 4,...
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US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey (Lesson 3 of 3): On Embodiment at the End of the World
From the series introduction: When I first met Natasha Trethewey she was a visiting fellow at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies and she said...
