This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s discussion is with Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a scholar and poet living and working in Durham, North Carolina. In addition to a number of scholarly and popular pieces, she is the author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, M Archive: After the End of the World, Dub: Finding Ceremony, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, and most recently Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. Across this conversation, we explore the meaning of Black Studies for Black feminist thinking, the relation of writing and expressive life to healing, and the place of history and memory for healing in times of political and cultural crisis.