Imagining Liberatory Futures with Alexis Pauline Gumbs and M. E. O’Brien

Queer Black Feminist love evangelist and the author of several books, most recently the biography Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde and Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals for which she received the Whiting Award in Non-Fiction. She is a co-editor with Mai’a Williams and China Martens of the anthology Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines. She is also the recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize in poetry, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in prose and a National Humanities Center Fellowship for her research on Queer Black Feminist literary and cultural praxis. Alexis has a PhD in English, African and African American Studies and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University. Archival research and intergenerational listening are her favorite forms of time travel. With her partner Sangodare, Alexis co-creates Mobile Homecoming, an experiential archive of Black feminist LGBTQ brilliance. Their current focus, supported by Monument Lab and the Loss and Damage Collaborative is listening to artists displaced or impacted by the climate crisis. Alexis is a grateful resident of Durham, North Carolina.

Two books: Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (Pluto, 2023), and a speculative novel entitled Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 (Common Notions, 2022), coauthored with Eman Abdelhadi. She is a co-editor of Pinko, a magazine on gay communism. Her work on family abolition has been translated into Chinese, German, Greek, French, Spanish, Catalan and Turkish. Previously, O’Brien coordinated the New York City Trans Oral History Project, and worked in HIV and AIDS activism and services. She completed her PhD at NYU, where she wrote on how capitalism shaped New York City LGBTQ social movements. She is a practicing psychotherapist, a clinical social worker, and in formation as a psychoanalyst at the Pulsion Institute.

Psychologist and psychoanalyst with a practice based in New York. She is a co-editor for the journal Studies in Gender & Sexuality and a clinical supervisor at Pulsion Institute, New York. Her published writing navigates the intersections of psychoanalytic theory, gender studies, and maternal subjectivity. She is a graduate of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.