A night of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines with coeditors and contributers & Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugivity by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Inspired by the legacy of radical and queer black feminists of the 1970s and ’80s, Revolutionary Mothering places marginalized mothers of color at the center of a world of necessary transformation. The challenges we face as movements working for racial, economic, reproductive, gender, and food justice, as well as anti-violence, anti-imperialist, and queer liberation are the same challenges that many mothers face every day. Oppressed mothers create a generous space for life in the face of life-threatening limits, activate a powerful vision of the future while navigating tangible concerns in the present, move beyond individual narratives of choice toward collective solutions, live for more than ourselves, and remain accountable to a future that we cannot always see. Revolutionary Mothering is a movement-shifting anthology committed to birthing new worlds, full of faith and hope for what we can raise up together.
China Martens is a Baltimore writer, zinestress extraordinaire, and empty-nest single mother of a 29-year-old. Her first book, The Future Generation: The Zine-Book for Subculture Parents, Kids, Friends and Others (Atomic Book Company, 2007) is a compilation of 16 years of her first zine. She is also the co-editor of "Don't Leave Your Friends Behind: Concrete Ways To Support Families In Social Justice Movements & Communities" and "Revolutionary Mothering: Love On The Front Lines." China has cofacilitated numerous workshops to create support for parents and children in activist and radical communities across the United States and Canada. She also was a cofounder of Kidz City, a radical childcare collective in Baltimore.
Mai’a Williams is a writer, editor, visual and performance artist. It was her living and working with Egyptian, Palestinian, Congolese, and Central American indigenous mothers in resistance communities, that inspired her life-giving work, radical mothering. She is author of two books of poetry, No God but Ghosts and Monsters and Other Silent Creatures and co-editor of the anthology, Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines.
In Spill, self-described queer Black troublemaker and Black feminist love evangelist Alexis Pauline Gumbs presents a commanding collection of scenes depicting fugitive Black women and girls seeking freedom from gendered violence and racism. In this poetic work inspired by Hortense Spillers, Gumbs offers an alternative approach to Black feminist literary criticism, historiography, and the interactive practice of relating to the words of Black feminist thinkers. Gumbs not only speaks to the spiritual, bodily, and otherworldly experience of Black women but also allows readers to imagine new possibilities for poetry as a portal for understanding and deepening feminist theory.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs was the first person to dig through the archives of several radical black feminist mothers including June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, and Toni Cade Bambara while writing her dissertation We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves: The Queer Survival of Black Feminism, a 500-page work. Alexis was named one of UTNE Reader’s 50 Visionaries Transforming the World in 2009, a Reproductive Reality Check Shero, and a Black Woman Rising nominee in 2010, and was awarded one of the first ever Too Sexy for 501c3 trophies in 2011! Alexis’s work as co-creator of the Mobile Homecoming experiential archive and documentary project has been featured in Curve magazine, the Huffington Post, in Durham Magazine and on NPR. Her newest book is Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugivity.