Read the Room: LIVE Discussion

Our featured pick for our live "Read the Room" session this month is the provocative and emotionally raw Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who describes herself as "Queer Black Troublemaker" and "aspirational cousin to all sentient beings." Undrowned, carried by Black feminist traditions, offers more than a way of thinking about marine mammals: it offers a practice of embodied relationship with them. The book invites us to listen to the currents of our ecosystems, to engage beyond-humans as kin, and learn from the lives shaped by breath, care, adaptation and survival—ways of being that can teach us how to resist a world organized by extraction and domination. That is why this book, and this conversation, is for everyone. While the book is grounded in Black feminist lineages, the invitation it extends is expansive: to deepen our relationship with our beyond-human kin, with ourselves, and with each other. We will highlight three selections from the text and discuss them with special guests and friends of APEX Advocacy Dr. Breeze Harper and Karen Knight, alongside APEX Director of Communications Yasmin Badshamiah, and APEX Director of Digital Media Strategy Christopher Sebastian.