m@ke my day!

@bout @lexis

This year Alexis is using her best developed and most cherished skill-the art of the life-changing workshop-to raise funds to support her decision to spend the next year doing the MobileHomeComing an immersive intergenerational community documentation and education project based on her lust for back queer community!  (It’s weird that somehow I have to be consistent with a choice to talk about myself in the third person here, but I want to interject in the first person to say that your support means everything to me and it is evidence of the fact that it is possible to be a community supported, community accountable scholar in the 21st Century.

Bring Alexis to your campus, community center,  to speak, or do a workshop that you will never forget!

at the Furious Flower Poetry Center!

Lectures:

Alexis is available to speak on a variety of topics and has tons of experiences speaking to audiences at elementary schools, college campuses, community centers, rallies, conferences and workshops.  Click on the links for examples of public talks she has given in the past.  She might particularly be a great person to complement your community or campus programming during Sexual Assault Awareness Month, Love Your Body Week, Celebration of Black Womanhood Week, Black Heritage Month, Women’s History Month, National Coming Out Day, Mother’s Day or throw tokenism to the wind and bring Alexis to speak and make any old day of the year a day filled with hope and magic!

Alexis’s Academic CV

Workshops:

(Most workshops are available either as a one time session, a day-long intensive or a series within the NC Triangle or Triad areas.  Get in touch about what works best for your community.  Below are workshops that I have facilitated many times before.  I can also design workshops specifically for your needs

Movement

Pressed for Knowledge: Alexis has facilitated this miraculous zine making workshop all over the United States in communities, on college campuses and at conferences.  In this workshop participants (whether they are part of an existing group or are meeting for the first time on the day of the workshop) use the resources of urgency, homegrown brilliance and whatever’s around to create their own publication in less than 2 hours.  Alexis leads participants in a process of choosing an audience, a theme that connects their passions and a work structure and a group evaluation process for their own urgent publication!  (NEW!!! Pressed for Knowledge is now available in a video version…where participants create and edit their own video in an amazingly short period of time!)

Grassroots Literary Production: Due to her experience leading the Pressed for Knowledge workshop and facilitating students at Duke University, UNC-Greensboro and the SpiritHouse Choosing Sides program in the creation of their own online and print collaborative publications, Alexis can train teachers, faculty and community cultural workers to make publication a part of their programming.

The Activist Impulse: Similar to the Pressed for Knowledge Workshop, this workshops leads participants through a process of deciding on, designing and enacting and evaluating a site-specific direct action.  Alexis has led this workshop with a class of Duke University Students, at the Ethnic Studies and the Activist Impulse Symposium at Columbia University, the Beyond the Box Conference at Barnard College, the Anarchist People of Color SouthEast Regional Conference and more!

Legacy

(These workshops are grounded in Alexis’s years of black feminist research and spiritual practice and are ideal for a community organization, school, department or group of people interested in how the theory, practice, poetry and lessons of black feminist practice apply to their present conditions)

Letters to Audre: developed in a special writing enrichment course that Alexis designed for Africana Women’s Studies majors at Bennett College for Women, this workshop or series of workshops introduces participants to key works by black feminist lesbian poet, scholar, activist Audre Lorde.  Participants create their own versions of/responses to poems and essays by Audre Lorde including Litany for Survival and The Uses of Anger.  Participatns also write their own poetic letters to this literary feminist ancestor.   See www.letterstoaudre.wordpress.com for examples.  Alexis is also available to lead seminars for faculty, teachers, and community educators on Teaching Audre Lorde.

Letters to June: Along a similar model as the Letters to Audre Workshop, this curriculum was developed for a feminist theory course at UNC-Greensboro.   Participants will write their own “Poem About My Rights” and “What’s Love Got to Do With It” and also engage some of Jordan’s lesser known and unpublished pieces.  Alexis is also available to use her privileged access as the first researcher to view June Jordan’s archival papers to lead seminars on Teaching June Jordan.

Litany for Survival: The Poetics of Community Building This writing and movement workshop, designed in collaboration with Ebony Golden starts from the grounding point of Audre Lorde’s Litany for Survival and leads participants through a process of analyzing the poem for themselves, using theater of the oppressed methodologies to demonstrate what survival means for them and creating their own praise poems towards the survival of their own communities.  This workshop was debuted at the Brecht Forum in New York City with an amazing response.

In Your Hands:  The Depth of Legacy: based on a spiritual experience that Alexis had of recieving and writing down letters from chosen, (and uninvited!) black feminist ancestors including Fannie Lou Hamer, Nayo Watkins, Toni Cade Bambara, Octavia Butler and her own grandmother (see the letters and the video documentation of the process here) this workshop is designed to facilitate participants in listening for and to the legacies of their own chosen traditions.  Alexis will facilitate a disucssion of some of the insights in the letters she recieved and each participant will leave with a plan and a way to make space for their own insights.

Sustainability

(these workshops are designed to keep community members, community organizers, students and teachers ALIVE AND WELL with full access to their love for themselves, each other and their inspired purpose!)

Habit Forming Love: This workshop shares the gifts of a 21 day process in which Alexis sought to learn how to love herself, her partner and her community better and to train herself in online video production and distribution.  Available as a one time workshop or a skills building series, this workshop will allow participants to use new media technology to deepen and activate their love for themselves, their chosen family and their communities.  Browse Alexis’s video project here.

Mother Ourselves: Created in collaboration with Zachari Curtis for the Gumbo Yaya Sister Circle, and inspired by Audre Lorde’s essay “Eye to Eye,” this workshop provides participants with a safe space to examine their thoughts about the meaning of “mothering,” and allows participants to explore what it might mean to nurture, teach and transform themselves.  In this workshop we work in partners, listen to our bodies, use mirrors and talk about the affirming and difficult process of reflections linked to our varied experiencs with mothering.

Sustainability for Organizers and Activists: The workshop, designed for (and with) the organizers and visionaries in Critical Resistance, is about ENDING ACTIVIST BURN OUT!!!!   Remembering that we, our bodies and our spirits are the most important resources for change, this workshop facilitates organizers in identifying the resources that keep them inspired and practices that can keep/get us well.   Every participant leaves with their own visible reminder of their own     wellness insights!

Vision

(These workshops are ideal for a community organization/project/coalition at a stage of inception or renewal.)

Dig: Grounding Community Transformation in Local Resources

Based on Alexis’s poem dig, this workshop is designed to get community members in touch with the secrets, issues, and resources in their own communities and to build a shared analysis of those resources as a guide for their community projects and alliances.   Each community will leave with at the very least, a group poem, new clarity about their resources and projects that connect and align their existing resources.  The “dig” exercise has been enacted in Greensboro, Miami, Asheville and Gainesville as part of the Grassroots Media Justice Tour.

Wishful Thinking: Vision and Actualization Based on Alexis’s poem in honor of black women and survivors of sexual violence in her community and recorded as a track on the SPEAK! CD this workshop leads participants through a meditation about their desires for their local communities and communities of affinity. Participants will leave with a community wishlist and individual affirmations.  To see some of the results of the version of Wishful Thinking facilitated with the Speak Media Collective at the Women and Action in the Media Conference see www.wakeupnew.blogspot.com.  

Support the Work:

(all proceeds go towards Alexis’s work on the mobilehomecoming project and do not include travel and accomodation.  Priority will be given to institutions in Lex’s home region of the North Carolina Triangle and Triad areas.)

Lectures:

Colleges and University-$1000 for lecture or poetic performance   ($2500 for a lecture or poetic performance, Q&A and an additional classroom visit)

Community Center/Non-profit- $200-300 for lecture  ($500 for lecture and workshop)

Autonomous Community Spaces (independent bookstores, churches etc.)- $100 for lecture(with the possibility of just passing the hat if we can also have publications for sale)

Workshops:

( each workshop will result in a publication/poem/major accomplishment for participants to keep and for the sponsor to be proud of!):

Colleges and Universities- $1000 ($3500 for a series)

Community Center/Non-profit- $300-500 (discounts for smaller or rural orgs, talk to me) ($850-1000 for a series)

Living Rooms/Kitchen Tables-  $100 or gather your people, pass the hat and have some yummy food on hand and I’m there!!! (maybe I was a travelling black feminist preacher in a past life…)

All suggested prices are really suggested.  Get in touch. (brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com)

We can work something out.

********************************************************************************************************************

Alexis is…making love (or reading lists) all of the time. Let me know what you think!

Browse That Little Black Book: Alexis’s (Theoretically) Black Blogspace

Buy “Abolition Now: 10 Years of Organizing Against the Prison Industrial Complex” featuring Lex’s chapter “Freedom Seeds: Growing Abolition in Durham, North Carolina”

Buy SPEAK! a CD by radical womyn of color featuring two poems by Alexis and a free curriculum.

Read “We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves” by Alexis in the Black Women’s Writing Reconsidered issue of Gender Forum

Read:The Life of a Poem: Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival” in Post-Lacrosse Durham in Reflections

Check out the current issue of Make/Shift Magazine, featuring a section called Letters to Black Feminist Ancestors”

check out “This Instant and This Triumph” American Book Review Volume 29 Issue 4 with a focus on Women of Color Publishing edited by Alexis!

Read Alexis’s essay “Buy One. Get One. Free.: A Pedagogy of Debt”, part of the Enough project.

Check out Alexis’s work in the latest issue of Left Turn

Read Alexis’s article “But Some of Us Are Brazen: Lust for a Black Queer Community” and her monthly column on black lesbians in publishing in Treazure Magazine

Read Alexis’s poem “Because” for the mothers of UBUNTU in the current issue of WombPoetry

Order the extremely limited edition Cleromancy poetry divination game hand-crafted for June Jordan and lovingly curated by your own Alexis!

Read The Coup Magazine: Black Women in the Diaspora Rising Up (especially Alexis’s article “Improvising Peace”)

Read “This is Love: Embracing Outerspace in a State of Emergency” (Political Musings on Me’shell Ndgecello’s “Comfort Woman”) in Brownstone Magazine

Read Alexis’s Biased Review of OutKast’s Idlewild Film

Check Out Alexis’s Poetry in Girlchild Press Bestseller:Growing Up Girl

Check Out Leaving Home Becoming Home (featuring Alice Walker, Asha Bandele, Jessica Care Moore, Shay Youngblood, Beatrice Sullivan, Elizabeth Anderson and…Alexis Pauline Gumbs!

Audit Alexis’s Online College Course: To Be A Problem: The Figure of the OutKast in Black Literature at (or request to drop by the “in person version at Duke University if you’re in North Carolina)
AND spread the word with this To Be A Problem Flyer

Stalk Alexis on Myspace

Coming soon: Alexis’s prose-poem “Deagalear Magalama: A Blue Airmail Letter in Macomere and a review of Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: Journey Along the Transatlantic Slave Route in Obsidian: Black Literature in Review