Gumbs is a queer, black writer, poet, and activist who has transformed the scope of intellectual, creative, and oracular writing with her triptych of experimental works. Unlike most academic texts, Gumb’s work has inspired artists across form to create dance works, installation work, paintings, processionals, divination practices, operas, quilts, and more.
COA 2022 honorary degree recipient Alexis Pauline Gumbs has transformed the scope of intellectual, creative, and oracular writing with her triptych of experimental works.Gumbs is the founder of Brilliance Remastered, an online network and series of retreats and online intensives serving community accountable intellectuals and artists. Through retreats on ancestor accountable, intellectual practice, and online courses on topics from anger as a resource to transnational intellectual solidarity, Gumbs and her Brilliance Remastered collaborators have nurtured a community of thinkers and artists grounded in the resources that normative institutions ignore.
She is a co-founder of UBUNTU, a women of color survivor-led coalition to end gendered violence, a member of the first visioning council of Kindred Southern Healing Justice Network, and a participant in Southerners on New Ground, Allied Media Projects, Black Women’s Blueprint, and the International Black Youth Summit. Along with her primary collaborator Sangodare, Gumbs also cofounded the Black Feminist Film School, an initiative to screen, study, and produce films with a Black feminist ethic.
For more than a decade Gumbs has brought a passion for the issues that impact oppressed communities and an intimate knowledge of the resilience of movements led by black, indigenous, working class women, and queer people of color. Her poetry and fiction appears in many creative journals and has been honored with inclusion in Best American Experimental Writing, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and honors from the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and the Firefly Ridge Women of Color Award.
Family and friends of the College of the Atlantic Class of 2022 are invited to join commencement in person on Saturday, June 4. The event will take place under a big tent on the college’s North Lawn on Saturday beginning at 2 p.m. The event will be streamed online for those who cannot make it to campus.
Attendees of 2022 COA commencement activities will be expected to follow all relevant campus COVID-19 protocols. COA is a fully vaccinated campus and visitors are expected to be as well.
