Women’s Herstory Month Keynote Speaker Focuses on Survival and Sustainability

For the keynote event in Trinity College’s celebration of Women’s Herstory Month, the Women and Gender Resource Action Center (WGRAC) and the Women’s Herstory Month Committee hosted activist, scholar, poet, and educator Alexis Pauline Gumbs to participate in a reading and discussion called, “‘Take Care of Your Blessings’: A Black Feminist Ethics of Survival.” Gumbs was invited to Trinity at the suggestion of Associate Professor of English David Sterling Brown ’06, who moderated the conversation.

Gumbs—a self-described “Queer Black Troublemaker” and “Black Feminist Love Evangelist”—was a 2020-2021 National Humanities Center Fellow and received a 2022 Whiting Award in Nonfiction, a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Prose, and a 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize in Poetry.

With nearly 100 people attending in person or watching online, the event at Trinity’s Cornelia Center on March 11, 2026, saw Brown and Gumbs engage in a far-reaching discussion. The conversation touched on Gumbs’ scholarship on the poet Audre Lorde, the concept of survival in relation to a sustainable future, and Black feminist lessons from the lives of marine mammals.

Gumbs began with a dedication to her late father and a reading from her most recent book, Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. She described the selection as “a relational biography about two warrior poets,” Lorde and Essex Hemphill, who participated in what Gumbs called “diasporic solidarity” as they battled illness, racism, sexism, and homophobia. Noteworthy for her activity in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Lorde “created a poetic practice expressing the interconnectedness of all things,” said Gumbs. “I think of her also as an ecologist, a philosopher of interconnection, and a devoted environmentalist.”

Following the reading, Gumbs answered several questions from both the moderator and the audience. In response to a query from Brown about the concepts of survival and sustainability in her texts, Gumbs responded that Lorde offers a theory of survival that is not individualistic. Gumbs said, “Because it’s based on this interconnectedness that she believed in, lived, and practiced, it’s not about how long one individual person can live.”

Gumbs bridged this concept of interconnectedness to another of her books, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. She suggested that marine mammals are engaged in the same “primary relationship” with the planet as humans, rather than living separate lives that could only serve as abstract metaphors. “I was reading research about hooded seals and I’m seeing them described as delinquent juveniles, when scientists found them in a place they supposedly weren’t supposed to live,” Gumbs said. “I was like, ‘Where have I heard that before?’”

Brown said that Gumbs was recommended to him by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown, who spoke at Trinity in spring 2025. Jericho Brown is the former graduate school mentee of New York Times bestselling author Claudia Rankine, who was the Fall Bicentennial Symposium keynote speaker at Trinity in 2023. “The connective intellectual tissue, and the trajectory from Rankine to Jericho Brown to Gumbs, showcases an important message about community that echoes many of the generative points Gumbs made during her talk,” said David Sterling Brown, who added that poet Kate Rushin (author of “The Bridge Poem”) attended the event as well.

David Sterling Brown noted the gender diversity of the crowd in attendance to hear from Gumbs. “Women’s Herstory Month events are often dominated by women attendees,” he said. “The reason I asked Gumbs about her heterosexual cis father identifying as a ‘queer Black feminist’ and what that meant to her is because it’s important for men to know they can and should be feminists. They should be at events like this. And it is important for people who are not Black to know they can and should identify as Black feminists, or at the very least understand how Black feminism is essential to everyone’s survival unlike mainstream (white) feminism.”

Cydney Hunt ’26, co-chair of the Women’s Herstory Month Committee, had a chance to reflect on the keynote event. “Dr. Gumbs’ talk was a thoughtful meditation on collective liberation and a reminder of the interconnectedness of structural oppression,” she said. “Her talk was emblematic of this year’s [Women’s Herstory Month] theme, women leading sustainable change, and affirmed the importance of building community.”

Laura Lockwood M’95, also a co-chair of the Women’s Herstory Month Committee and director of WGRAC, which is within Trinity’s Office of Community and Belonging (OCB), said, “Using her books, poetry, love, activism, and ancestral foundation, Alexis Pauline Gumbs spoke to the Women’s Herstory Month theme of women’s leadership and building a sustainable future, as well as Trinity’s new guiding values: access, connection, belonging, and curiosity with inquiry. She explored the interconnectedness between all species, the ‘universality of breathing,’ and traversed interlacing forms of oppression as benefits the system of capitalism.” Lockwood added, “The intergenerational and diverse audience seemed spellbound by her words, her writing, her stories, her wisdom, her love.”

The event concluded with a book signing. Lockwood said, “The excitement was palpable as she left the stage to sign books—many greeted her, wanting to meet her. We felt ‘in community’ through her presence, challenged to act and create change.”

Trinity’s 2026 Women’s Herstory Month programming, “Leading the Change: Women Shaping a Sustainable Future,” kicked off with a talk by TinaMarie Lugo—a licensed social worker and wife of Trinity President Dan Lugo—on March 3. The month concludes with the annual Women’s Appreciation Dinner hosted by the Men of Color Alliance (M.O.C.A.) on March 27 and the Girls Bands Concert on March 28 at The Mill. Lockwood and four students will attend the Feminist Majority Foundation’s National Young Feminist Leadership Conference (NYFLC) from March 28 to 30, in Washington, D.C.

See a recording of Gumbs’ talk and more photos of the event below.