Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a queer Caribbean poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is the author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press, 2020); coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (PM Press, 2016); and the author of a triptych of experimental works published by Duke University Press:Dub: Finding Ceremony (2020), M Archive: After the End of the World (2018), and Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (2016).

Gumbs’s poetry and fiction have been included in Best American Experimental Writing and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Additionally, she has received the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and the Firefly Ridge Women of Color Award.

Gumbs is the creative writing editor at Feminist Studies and has been in residence as a National Humanities Center Fellow, where she wrote Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024). Gumbs is the founder and director of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, an educational program based in Durham, North Carolina, where she lives.