Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs contains multitudes. It is simultaneously a grief journal, an ode to radical love, and a critical Black feminist fabulation that allows us to imagine differently as we strain against the limits of colonial and positivist methods of knowing about human and more-than-human worlds. Dr. Gumbs invites us to “undo” prevailing definitions of the human, and, in the vein of Sylvia Wynter, to “unsettle the coloniality of being.” She invites us to notice that the boundaries that separate us from our marine mammal cousins are porous—and to notice that the violence that touches them also touches us.
Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde is a queer Black feminist love evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all life. Publisher’s Weekly calls her writing “groundbreaking.” She is also the author of four earlier books aka portable textual ceremonies, including Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals which won the 2022 Whiting Award in Non-Fiction. The Anguilla Literary Festival called Alexis the "pride of Anguilla." A recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize in Poetry, the National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a National Humanities Center Fellowship, Dr. Gumbs lives and loves in Durham, North Carolina.