upcoming grant deadline: 05/15/2024
In a February 2019 article for ArtBlog, poet and author Levi Bentley (ACG '17) penned a short, earnest, and appreciative review of Alexis Pauline Gumbs's newest work of speculative fiction, M Archive. Written from a Black feminist perspective, the premise Gumbs offers is one that celebrates the deep knowledge and possibility that Black life (and specifically Black women) carry into a future narrative. From the ArtBlog article:
M Archive by Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a multi-disciplinary Black Feminist expedition, the middle-book in a triptych that combines poetry, fiction, and theory to envision the persistence of Black life through and beyond a series of disasters and cataclysms that currently are in full-swing. It is a work that exceeds genre and carries messages of warning and hope and clues for survival, back from a future of as of yet unaverted disaster. In this future, survival of the planet and of Black life is uncertain, but Black life has outstripped other cultures and continues to hold promise of the possibility of survival. Black life, specifically Black women are revealed to be the root and center of vitality, the labor and the care that makes all life and survival possible.
