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Primary: After and With Alma Thomas
Not yet published
Expected 29 Sep 26176 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication September 29, 2026
About the author
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
35 books598 followersAlexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity and 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.
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Review of advance copy
Primary: After and With Alma Thomas offers a distinctive literary and artistic engagement with the life and work of Alma Thomas, using poetry and prose to explore creativity, community, sisterhood, and the possibilities of artistic practice. Alexis Pauline Gumbs approaches Thomas not simply as an influential modernist painter, but as an artist whose creative life was deeply connected to Black community and collective transformation.
The book brings attention to Thomas's work as an artist, educator, mentor, and advocate. Her experience teaching in segregated Washington, D.C., and her efforts to create art programs for Black schoolchildren and spaces for Black artists add important social and communal dimensions to discussions of her abstract art.
One of the book's most compelling elements is the relationship Gumbs develops between Thomas's creativity and her own artistic and intellectual practice. Through poems and prose, Gumbs becomes a student of Thomas, reflecting on creativity, daughtering, sistering, memory, and the ways artistic relationships can open new possibilities for communal life.
The book has strong relevance across contemporary art, African American studies, Black feminist thought, poetry, cultural criticism, art history, and creative practice. Its combination of literary writing and critical engagement also makes it particularly interesting for readers exploring the connections between visual art, identity, community, education, and social transformation.
The Goodreads listing currently shows 0 ratings and 0 written reviews, while the book is forthcoming on September 29, 2026. This creates an important opportunity to establish reader awareness before publication and introduce Primary to audiences interested in Alma Thomas, Black art, poetry, feminist scholarship, and contemporary cultural criticism.
The book brings attention to Thomas's work as an artist, educator, mentor, and advocate. Her experience teaching in segregated Washington, D.C., and her efforts to create art programs for Black schoolchildren and spaces for Black artists add important social and communal dimensions to discussions of her abstract art.
One of the book's most compelling elements is the relationship Gumbs develops between Thomas's creativity and her own artistic and intellectual practice. Through poems and prose, Gumbs becomes a student of Thomas, reflecting on creativity, daughtering, sistering, memory, and the ways artistic relationships can open new possibilities for communal life.
The book has strong relevance across contemporary art, African American studies, Black feminist thought, poetry, cultural criticism, art history, and creative practice. Its combination of literary writing and critical engagement also makes it particularly interesting for readers exploring the connections between visual art, identity, community, education, and social transformation.
The Goodreads listing currently shows 0 ratings and 0 written reviews, while the book is forthcoming on September 29, 2026. This creates an important opportunity to establish reader awareness before publication and introduce Primary to audiences interested in Alma Thomas, Black art, poetry, feminist scholarship, and contemporary cultural criticism.
Displaying 1 of 1 review