Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

"Survival is a Promise is no mere biography—it is a communion, an ancestral divination, a long intimate walk where history, poetry, politics, and wisdom are passed to a new generation.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer and a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofits’ 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. The focus on Lorde’s quotable essays, to the neglect of her complex poems, has obscured her deep engagement with the natural world and the planetary dynamics of geology, meteorology, and biology. Lorde’s ecological imagery is not merely metaphorical but rather a literal guide to being of Earth on Earth, to survival—to living 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. Lorde’s life and work become more than sound bites; they become a cosmic force, teaching us the grand contingency of life together on Earth.