Poets and writers Susan Howe and Alexis Pauline Gumbs read each other’s work and discuss reading and being read as an act of intimacy

Published on the occasion of Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the book series Who Is Queen? adapts conversations between pairs of notable writers, theorists, philosophers and musicians into contrapuntal texts intertwined with archival photographs and additional writings. Alexis Pauline Gumbs (born 1982) is the author of several books, most recently Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (2020), and the cofounder of the Mobile Homecoming Trust, an intergenerational experiential living library of Black LBGTQ brilliance. Susan Howe’s (born 1937) most recent poetry collection was Concordance, published in 2020 along with a reissue of Spontaneous Particulars (2014), a prose meditation on her research in rare book collections. Her selected essays, collected in The Quarry, were published in 2015, and a poetry collection, Debths (2017), won Canada’s Griffin Award for Poetry in 2018.