About the Book
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.
About the Author :
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.
Review :
"Layered and original . . . Gumbs's book revels in Lorde's lush multiplicity, moving through the ebbs and flows of her life with both precision and lyricism and expanding the limits of what a biography can be and hold and feel like . . . The result is a prismatic work of art." --Danielle Amir Jackson, The Atlantic
"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." --Zito Madu, The Washington Post
"Gumbs's persuasive close readings create a virtuous circle, shining a light on how the life generated the poems, which now elucidate that life. Her goal is to steer us away from the one-liners . . . that have too often been Lorde's legacy and focus us instead on the poet's forthright voice, on the political and emotional resonance of her work . . . Gumbs honors Lorde's desire for an expansive legacy." --Ayten Tartici, The New York Times Book Review
"[Survival is a Promise] expands our understanding of Lorde's thought by drawing out how presciently and intensely she engaged with ecology and the environment . . . This imaginative work is an effort to render Lorde as fully and humanely as possible . . . Gumbs is working to expand our register of knowledge, which includes transforming her own life into the vision that Lorde set forth." --J Wortham, The New York Times magazine
"Gumbs asks: how might we think of Audre Lorde, not as a hollow symbol of Black feminism, but as a thinker whose own survival in a world premised on her extinction required her to take up the task of self-defense through poetry and political action? She approaches Lorde as one would a mentor, mother, sister, auntie, lover--with curiosity and mutual respect . . . Ultimately, she shows us the kind of complex and radiant scholarship that emerges when scholars dig deeper, refusing to treat the life and work of Black feminist figures as self-evident. " --Lola Olufemi, The Guardian
"The strength of Survival is in its carefully rendered portraits of Lorde's intimate relationships, both romantic and platonic. Gumbs clearly relates how Lorde's commitment to world-building was not simply an abstract concern left to the domain of literature, but was realized in real-life communion with her chosen family . . . In every phase, we see Lorde herself as an energetic force that exists beyond the boundary of her body, and, certainly, the span of her life." --Hawa Allan, The Boston Globe
"Both a biography and a celebration of the icon's life and work . . . [Survival Is A Promise] offers a deeper understanding of [Lorde's] poetry, highlighting key moments that shaped her identity and activism, all with the hope of showing how expansive Lorde's life was. Ultimately, Gumbs's book argues that Lorde's legacy lies not just in her powerful words but also in her embodiment of resilience and love in the face of adversity." --Marian Jones, The Nation
"Gumbs brings to life the interiority of Lorde's poetry, the influence of Lorde's early avid reading on her work, and the impact of her poetry on the world around her -- and the world around us . . . If survival is indeed a promise, Gumbs certainly keeps it by honoring Lorde's legacy." --Elise Mitchell, Lux
"[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)
"A celebration of a tireless advocate . . . Stars, hurricanes, and even whale songs feature in a narrative notable for lyrical prose and unabashed admiration . . . Gumbs offers thoughtful analyses of Lorde's poems, as well as the pressures and pleasures of her life: friends and lovers; marriage to a white gay man; motherhood; divorce; and recurring cancer . . . A defiant woman sensitively and incisively portrayed." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A] sublime biography . . . An inventive and thorough look into Lorde's work and life that illustrates how truly impactful [Lorde's] power was and continues to be . . .This is an elegant portrait of a revered and beloved icon." --Booklist (starred review)
"Lorde has found the perfect interlocutor. Gumbs' writing is multilayered, poetic and beautiful, making this book more than a biography. It's a meeting of two minds . . . Survival Is a Promise bears an important and hopeful message for us all: Survival is a communal act of care." --BookPage (starred review)
"Through meticulous research into Lorde's unpublished manuscripts and lesser-known writings, Gumbs uncovers layers of Lorde's thought that challenge the reductionist view of her as just a collection of memorable quotes. Survival is a Promise revitalizes Audre Lorde's work by illuminating its eternal relevance and depth."
--New York Amsterdam News
"Gumbs, one of our great poets, has delivered not only a masterful biography of Audre Lorde but a revolution in what a biography can be. Whether you only know Lorde through her most famous quotes or if you've read everything she wrote a thousand times, there is something new and exciting here for you. Structurally playful, deeply researched, vibrantly felt, it's a masterwork all around." --LitHub
"An award-winning poet, writer, feminist and activist in her own right, Gumbs is among the first researchers to delve into Lorde's manuscript archives. The resulting book highlights the late author's commitment to interrogating what it means to survive on this planet--and how Lorde's radical understanding of ecology can guide us today." --Erika Taylor, NPR
"Alexis Pauline Gumbs has been a kindred keeper of Audre Lorde's lesbian-warrior-poet legacy for nearly two decades. This long overdue, and yet right-on-time biography of the Lorde caresses and transgresses the limits of genre, to care for all the women and girls that Audre Lorde ever was or hoped to be. Nobody tends to Black girls' stories like Alexis P. Gumbs, who takes Black women deadly rigorously seriously. This book is a study in mastery of forms, with the kind of sacred irreverence that makes clear who the real geniuses always were. I read this book and could hear the Lorde saying, 'and it was good.'" --Brittney Cooper, author of the New York Times bestseller Eloquent Rage
"A life-giving enquiry into the visionary Audre Lorde. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, an extraordinary poet, composes this remarkable work from many growing tips that tangle and entwine. Flowing through this adventure is a vital pulse of insight: Poetry is woven through our flesh and is fundamental to the way we think, feel, imagine, heal, and transform. Gumbs's breathtaking telling of Lorde is an intimate guide to some of poetry's most fierce and tender powers." --Merlin Sheldrake, author of Entangled Life
"With Survival is a Promise Alexis Pauline Gumbs has succeeded in crafting a multi-faceted diamond of a biography lovingly tracing the shape of Lorde's impact upon this earth, her eternal life. Dazzling like a burst of light, nurturing like a gray whale and fierce like a hurricane, this book is a gift of "well-researched wonder" that deftly holds close possibility, imagination, questioning and the sensuality of the archive. I dare you to read it and not recognise that Lorde's story is inseparable from the story of all life, even yours." --Stella Bolaki, co-editor of Audre Lorde's Transnational Legacies
"Survival is a Promise is a lightning strike of a biography on The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. It is poetic in form, political in scope, and revelatory in understanding Lorde's divine relationship to the Earth as an ecological thinker. Alexis Pauline Gumbs has created a community of poetic ancestors including June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, and Fannie Lou Harmer, now eternal sisters with whom she stands alongside in a circle of relationships. Gumbs describes the work of Audre Lorde as 'a Black archive of buried photosynthesis.' In her hands, it is pure light in the vitality of the struggle. This singular volume is a 'force field of love' full of prophetic dreaming animating not only what is possible but necessary. Power lives in this book. Chapter by stunning chapter, this spiritual biography made me want to be braver in voice and spirit." --Terry Tempest Williams, Writer-in-Residence, Harvard Divinity School
"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
"This is the one book I would take with me to my desert Island. I would survive on the nectar of Gumbs rich dark earthy prose and drink in the sweet pain of Lorde's blackness so I can see the hopeful dawn of her fierce love on the horizon and know I will be saved. That's the promise of this book." --Heidi Safia Mirz
