Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson: University of Washington

Walker Ames Room (Kane Hall) Red Square (University Of Washington), Seattle, Washington 98105

The Lee Scheingold Lecture in Poetry and Poetics is thrilled to welcome Dr. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs to the University of Washington on Thursday, March 7, 2019. A reception will be held from 5:30-6:30 in the Walker-Ames Room in Kane Hall. From 7:00-8:15, Dr. Simpson and Dr. Gumbs will each share a short talk on poetry, poetics, and social justice, and then will be in conversation in Room 220 in Kane Hall. A book signing will follow. This lecture is hosted by the UW English Department and is made possible through the generous support of Lee Scheingold. Free and open to the public.

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), andThe 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.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs: 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; coeditor 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 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.