In this poem, author Alexis Pauline Gumbs imagines what artist Alma Thomas was thinking as she created one of her iconic works.
by Alexis Pauline Gumbs | After “Nature’s Red impressions” by Alma Thomas (1968)

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a queer Black feminist writer and scholar based in Durham. Gumbs has been honored with a Windham-Campbell Prize in Poetry among other awards and most recently wrote Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. Her forthcoming book, Primary, consists of poems and essays in response to the work of the late visual artist Alma Thomas. “Thomas was born in 1891 outside Columbus, Georgia, where due to segregation she could not step foot in an art museum. She went on to be the first graduate of the Howard University Art Department and the first Black woman to have a solo show in the Whitney Museum of American Art. But before all that, she was the oldest child in her family, who grieved the loss of a younger sister to diphtheria.”