In celebration of the third Maine Lit Fest, award-winning poet and scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs reads from and discusses her newest book, Primary: After and With Alma Thomas, about the twentieth-century modern artist best known for her bright, mosaic-like abstract paintings. The Q&A will be moderated by Assistant Professor Sonya Donaldson of African American Studies, and a reception will follow to kick off the Maine Lit Festival.
Free event with RSVP.
Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a Queer Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all life. Her work in this lifetime is to facilitate infinite, unstoppable ancestral love in practice. Alexis’s books are portable textual ceremonies. Publisher’s Weekly calls her writing “groundbreaking.” She is/they are the author of several books, most recently Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde and the award-winning Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, winner of the 2022 Whiting Award in Non-Fiction. A recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize in Poetry, the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and a National Humanities Center Fellowship, Dr. Gumbs lives and loves in Durham, North Carolina. She is/they are the co-founder of the Mobile Homecoming Trust, an intergenerational experiential living library of Black LGBTQ brilliance.
Dr. Sonya Donaldson is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Colby College. Her research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American Literature and Culture, Digital Humanities, Black German Studies, and AI. She is the curator of the digital humanities project Singing the Nation, an ephemeral archive of performances of James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and the executive director of Media and Archives for the Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA). Her book manuscript, “Irreconcilable Differences: Memory, History, and the Echoes of Diaspora,” is in progress. Her digital research project, Fictions of Black Girlhood, examines how generative AI tools interpolate Black girls within spatial and poetic contexts, thereby (re)producing tropes of Blackness and shifting the textual and visual terrains of Black girlhood. Donaldson earned a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Virginia and a BA from Brooklyn College, CUNY. Her work has appeared in The Digital Black Atlantic, sx salon, Women, Gender and Families of Color, Zeal: A Journal for the Liberal Arts, and African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal.
Colby is grateful to the following sponsors for supporting Colby College’s participation in the 2026 Maine Lit Fest. Thank you to The Arts Office, Creative Writing Program, Cultural Events Committee, English Department, Jennifer Jahrling Forese Fund, Goldfarb Center for Public Service, Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, Kristina Stahl Fund, and Visiting Writers Series.