“Heard: A Conversation with Susan Howe and Alexis Pauline Gumbs”
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.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a Queer Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all life. She is/they are the author of several books, most recently “Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals,” and the cofounder of the Mobile Homecoming Trust, an intergenerational experiential living library of Black LBGTQ brilliance.

Susan Howe’s most recent poetry collection was “Concordance,” published in 2020 along with a reissue of “Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives’ (2014), a prose meditation on her research in various 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. Her earlier critical study, “My Emily Dickinson,” was reissued in 2007 with an introduction by Eliot Weinberger. Four CDs in collaboration with the musician/composer David Grubbs, “Thiefth,” “Souls of the Labadie Tract,” “Frolic Architecture,” and “Woodslippercounterclatter,” were released on the Blue Chopsticks label.

This podcast comprises a series of monthly conversations organized by Adam Pendleton and featuring pairs of notable writers, theorists, philosophers, and musicians. Participants include Jack Halberstam and Lynne Tillman, Michael Hardt and Joshua Chambers-Letson, Ruby Sales and Simone White, Susan Howe and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Tyshawn Sorey and Matana Roberts. This audio series is published on moma.org as part of the exhibition “Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?” Excerpts from these dialogues are periodically incorporated into the sound installation within the exhibition, on view September 18, 2021–January 30, 2022. The conversations are presented in fragments, purposely incomplete.

Heard: A Conversation with Susan Howe and Alexis Pauline Gumbs

In the first episode, Jace Clayton (DJ /rupture)sits down with Deantoni Parks to discuss Parks' influences, his 2015 album "Technoself," and his musical evolution from live drumming to a unique combination of live sampling and percussion.


Episode 1: Deantoni Parks

Matt Werth sits down with Sherard Ingram, a.k.a. DJ Stingray, to discuss the man behind the mask, the birth of techno in Detroit, and Ingram's involvement with the mysterious electronic music duo Drexciya.

Episode 2: DJ Stingray

MoMA PS1 Associate Curator Jenny Schlenzka sits down with Juliana Huxtable to discuss Huxtable's interest in young rappers from Chicago, the dance party "Shock Value" she co-founded, and her gospel music influences.

Episode 3: Juliana Huxtable

In this episode, Jace Clayton (DJ /rupture) talks with Yulan Grant, a.k.a. SHYBOI, about Jamaican soundclash, the state of club culture in New York, #KUNQ, and her zine BD GRMMR. 

Heard: A Conversation with Susan Howe and Alexis Pauline Gumbs

The Museum of Modern Art

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