Survival Is a Promise

The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

By: Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Narrated by: Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Long-listed, BookPage Best Books of the Year, 2024

Long-listed, Carnegie Medal, 2024

Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year

Plutarch Awards Nominee, 2025

Long-listed, NYPL Best Books of the Year, 2024

This program is read by the author.

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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

©2024 Alexis Pauline Gumbs (P)2024 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"[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)

"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

Brilliant homage in the tradition of the great black lesbian poet mother warrior woman whose legacy survives to this day.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs lovingly crafts language and thematic structures to transmit the legacy of a great modern poet activist human being.

outstanding!!! pure genius

Poet Gump is brilliant, a poet of distinction and she brings Audre lorde to life. riveting!!!

love in the mi·nu·ti·ae of Lorde

A panoptic, sweeping and fully contextualized biography of Audre Lorde - in which the fabric and texture of her precious human life is woven into quilt I can wrap myself inside. The full scope of Audre’s life - her birth, her trans•generational epigenetic inheritance, her unrepeatable mind and genius, her heart and loves, her singular talent and vision - all of her is included and fully annotated. This is a masterpiece on how to ‘study’ a human life - with loving, honest wonder. So grateful to listen to Alexis Pauline Gumbs read it in her own voice with all the intended inflections. Along with Gumb’s own poetic turns of phrase. Thank you for this gift of a book I will re-read many times in my lifetime.

Creative exploration of Audre’s life

This book is profoundly loving and respectful of Audre Lorde. It’s very well researched and I gained new insights into Audre’s life and work. I appreciated the deep dives into her friendships with other radical and feminist Black lesbians and gay men. But the blending of science, spirituality, politics, and poetry with prose stories and accounts of many key moments from her life makes this book utterly unique and astounding to me. I was very fortunate to be at the 1990 I Am Your Sister Boston celebration and conference Audre attended.

a powerful story of A.L.'s life

I love that the sorry weaves Audre's life story through her works and what was happening in her life at the time the works were written and inspired.