Featuring Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Alexis Pauline Gumbs.  Dr. Simpson and Dr. Gumbs will each share a short talk on poetry, poetics, and social justice, and then will be in conversation. A reception in the Walker-Ames Room (Kane 225) will precede the event at 5:30 p.m.; all are welcome.  Seating is limited.

Dr. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist, who has been widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Her work breaks open the intersections between politics, story and song—bringing audiences into a rich and layered world of sound, light, and sovereign creativity.

Working for over a decade as an independent scholar using Nishnaabeg intellectual practices, Leanne has lectured and taught extensively at universities across Canada and has twenty years experience with Indigenous land-based education. She holds a PhD from the University of Manitoba, is currently a Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Faculty of Arts at Ryerson University and faculty at the Dechinta Centre for Research & Learning in Denendeh. Leanne's books are regularly used in courses across Canada and the United States, including Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back, The Gift Is in the Making,  Lighting the Eighth Fire (editor), This Is An Honour Song (editor with Kiera Ladner) and The Winter We Danced (Kino-nda-niimi editorial collective).  Her latest book, As We Have Always Done:  Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance was published by the University of Minnesota Press in the fall of 2017, and was awarded Best Subsequent Book by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.

Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs

As an educator, Alexis Pauline Gumbs walks in the legacy of Black lady school teachers in post-slavery communities who offered sacred educational space to the intergenerational newly free in exchange for the random necessities of life. She honors the lives and creative works of Black feminist geniuses as sacred texts for all people. She believes that in the time we live in, access to the intersectional, holistic brilliance of the Black feminist tradition is as crucial as learning how to read.  She brings that approach to her work as the provost of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, a transmedia-enabled community school (aka tiny black feminist university) and lending library based in Durham, North Carolina.

A queer black troublemaker, a black feminist love evangelist and a prayer poet priestess, Alexis has a PhD in English, African and African-American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University. She was the first scholar to research the Audre Lorde Papers at Spelman College, the June Jordan Papers at Harvard University, and the Lucille Clifton Papers at Emory University during her dissertation research.

She is the author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, also published by Duke University Press; co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines; and the founder and director of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, an educational program based in Durham, North Carolina. Following the innovative collection Spill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's M Archive—the second book in a planned experimental triptych—is a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following a worldwide cataclysm. Engaging with the work of the foundational Black feminist theorist M. Jacqui Alexander, and following the trajectory of Gumbs's acclaimed visionary fiction short story “Evidence,” M Archive is told from the perspective of a future researcher who uncovers evidence of the conditions of late capitalism, antiblackness, and environmental crisis while examining possibilities of being that exceed the human.