Survival Is a Promise
The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A Time Must-Read Book of the Year
Winner of the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year
Shortlisted for the 2025 Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize
Finalist for the 2025 Zora Award
A bold, innovative biography that offers a new understanding of the life, work, and enduring impact of Audre Lorde.
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Through impressively deep research and consideration, queer Black feminist poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs pays tribute to the extraordinary life of Audre Lorde in this alternative biography. Gumbs discusses Lorde’s upbringing in Harlem, her formative relationships, the conflicts she endured, and the complex feelings she attempted to navigate. But this is far from an ordinary retelling of Lorde’s life. Lyrical and free-form, Gumbs’ writing reflects the distinctive and fascinating style of Lorde, whose influential work popularized the concept of intersectional feminism. Read it from start to finish, or dive into a chapter and be absorbed in a metaphoric theme of Lorde’s life, whether it’s Atlantic gray whales making all the world’s oceans their home or an inquisitive passage contemplating the structures that influence our understanding of racial history. This sensitive and deeply thought-out reflection is a dazzling love letter to the enduring legacy of a powerful writer, poet, philosopher, feminist, advocate, and activist.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This scintillating tour de force from poet Gumbs (Undrowned) traces the life of feminist poet Audre Lorde (1934–1992) in a free-ranging style as distinctive as its subject. Among other topics, Gumbs discusses Lorde's upbringing in Harlem amid rampant police violence, her conflicted feelings about teaching literature to cops at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the 1970s, and her poetry's exploration of the relationship between individuals and their environment. Highlighting formative figures in the poet's life, Gumbs explores how the memory of Lorde's first love, who killed herself when she and Lorde were teenagers, haunted Lorde's writing for decades, and contends that psychologist Frances Clayton, Lorde's long-term partner, brought a stabilizing influence to the poet's personal life. 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. (A chapter comprised almost entirely of questions pondering how Lorde made sense of the racist children's literature she read in her youth calls attention to the shortcomings of the archival record and imagination's inescapable role in reconstructing history.) 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.
