Audre Lorde is another writer, like Baldwin, before our current time whose words find deep resonance with the current challenges we face. If one wants to feel the impact of Lorde’s work in the present go to Alexis Pauline Gumbs ig page and watch her video the day after the election. Gumbs takes an Audre Lorde poem, reads it aloud so we can feel the poem’s vibratory energy and breaks it down into a call to action.

Mullen’s biography centers on Baldwin’s political engagements and their historical contexts throughout his life. In a way it is an intellectual biography that uses Baldwin’s specific political involvement as a lens. Mullen places Baldwin’s reality as Black, gay man growing up in Harlem as the gravitational center of his politics and from there was Baldwin’s commitment to saving himself and preserving his art but knowing that doing so also meant engaging with all those impacted by the persistent racism and homophobia that is a throughline from Baldwin’s time to ours.