Lecture Title: A Homemade Field of Love: Expansive Understandings of Growth in Times of Change
Description: Community cherished Black feminist writer and scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs will lead an interactive lecture inspired by the “field” as a form of life, from a field of collard greens, to the quantum field. These mediations on “the field” are inspired by her research on June Jordan, Fannie Lou Hamer, George Washington Carver and her most recent book Primary: After and With Alma Thomas. And what fertilizes it all is the legacy of Sonja Haynes Stone whom this lecture celebrates as a founder of the infinitely possible field of Black Studies.
Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a Queer Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational favorite cousin to all life. Her work in this lifetime is to facilitate infinite, unstoppable ancestral love in practice. Alexis’ books are portable textual ceremonies. Her most recent book Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde revolutionizes the scale of life writing. Her award-winning meditation Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals offers the critical interspecies love song we need at this urgent stage of our collective evolution. Alexis is also currently working her next book in honor of June Jordan and Fannie Lou Hamer, A Homemade Field of Love (forthcoming from Yale University Press). Alexis is currently a Monument Lab Fellow and a Loss and Damage Collaborative Commissioned Author creating ceremony in honor of the wisdom of climate catastrophe survivors in the legacy of Audre Lorde. Alexis received a 2023 Windham Campbell Prize Winner in Poetry, 2022 Whiting Award in Nonfiction and a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Prose. Alexis was also a 2020-2021 National Humanities Center Fellow. She has transformed the scope of intellectual, creative and oracular writing with her triptych of experimental works published by Duke University Press (Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity in 2016, M Archive: After the End of the World in 2018 and Dub: Finding Ceremony in 2020.) Unlike most academic texts, Alexis’s work has inspired artists across form to create dance works, installation work, paintings, processionals, divination practices, operas, quilts and more.
Read more about the speaker: www.alexispauline.com
Register now: https://go.unc.edu/StoneMemorialLecture