Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

Roosevelt House, along with the Hunter College Department of Women and Gender Studies, is pleased to present a unique discussion—both heartfelt and scholarly—of the legendary poet, essayist, activist, and alumna of Hunter College High School (’51) and Hunter College (’59), Audre Lorde (1934-1992); featuring acclaimed Lorde biographer and poet, Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

One of the most influential writers of the 20^th century, Lorde, a New York State Poet Laureate, deployed her arsenal of words on behalf of civil rights, women’s rights, and LGBTQ rights, frequently elevating her sense of outrage into lyrical and hypnotic verse. It was to honor Lorde’s words, and the fight for justice that compelled her to write them, that Hunter College, along with the city of New York, officially named the Hunter College crossroads of Lexington Avenue and 68^th Street, “Audre Lorde Way”—enshrining her memory not just in the hearts of her readers, but in the landscape of the city, and campus, that helped her to find her voice.

As if to further amplify that voice, the bold and innovative biography, Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, offers a new understanding of Lorde’s life, work, and enduring significance. Layered and lyrical, celebratory and scintillating, Survival Is a Promise has been hailed as “a multi-faceted diamond of a biography lovingly tracing the shape of Lorde’s impact on this earth” written “in a free-ranging style as distinctive as its subject” by “Lorde’s spiritual daughter” and “a kindred keeper of Audre Lorde’s lesbian-warrior-poet legacy for nearly two decades.” The first researcher to explore the full depths of Lorde’s manuscript archives, Gumbs will be in conversation about her book with award-winning author and Hunter College High School alumna Mecca Jamilah Sullivan.

In one of Lorde’s most quoted lines, the self-described “Sister Outsider” memorably declared: “I am deliberate and afraid of nothing”—a credo she courageously demonstrated in her 17 books and lifelong battles for justice. But Gumbs’ passionate and persuasive book invites, and implores, readers to look beyond the quotable one-liners for which Lorde has become so well known—to the complexity of her poetry and its deep engagement with the natural world. According to Gumbs, Lorde’s understanding of survival was not simply about getting through to the other side of oppression or resilience in the face of cancer—it was about the stakes of living on, and with, a planet in transformation. Lorde’s legacy, in Gumbs’ hands, becomes much more than a collection of sound bites; it becomes a cosmic force and a grand lesson in how to live together on this earth.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the author of several works of poetry, including Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity and M Archive: After the End of the World, as well as 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.

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is the author of the novel Big Girl; the award-winning story collection Blue Talk and Love; and The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora. An English professor at Georgetown University and alumna of Hunter College High School, Sullivan’s scholarly and creative work engages closely with Lorde’s poetry and prose.

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https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87055911420