Toshi Reagon is a multi-talented and versatile singer, composer, musician, curator, and producer with a profound ear for sonic Americana. Her expansive career includes residences at Carnegie Hall, the Paris Opera House, and multiple festivals and venues nationally and internationally. A highly collaborative artist, she has worked with many musicians, choreographers, film and theater makers, including Meshell Ndegeocello, Alsarah, Lizz Wright, Urban Bush Women, Dorrance Dance, Ananya Chatterjea, Nona Hendryx, Carl Hancock Rux, Rhiannon Giddens, Robert Wilson, her band BIGLovely and many more.

Toshi co-composed music for two Peabody Award-winning films. She is a 2015 Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow, a 2018 United States Artist Fellow, an Andrew W. Melon Creative Futures Fellow Carolina Performing Arts. She is currently a Met Museum Civic Practice Fellow and a Bowdoin College Joseph McKeen Visiting Fellow. In 2021, Toshi received the APAP Award for Merit in the Performing Arts and was a recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in Music.

In 2022 Toshi received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Emerson College. In 2011 she founded the Community based festival Word*Rock*& Sword. In 2018 she created the production company Wise Reagon Arts which produces the opera Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower Created by Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon w/ Music and Lyrics by Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon. As of 2023 the opera has been presented on 4 continents and has been seen by over 40,000 audience members.

Ongoing projects include Songs of the Living Community Choir, Sacred Revolution (A Song Cycle), The Bernice Johnson Reagon Songbook. LongWaterSong- Marine Mammal Meditations w/ Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Octavia’s Parables Podcast w/ adrienne maree brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Toshi continues produce, present and collaborate with artist and practitioners of all kinds. She continues to tour as a solo artist and with her band Toshi Reagon and BIGLovely. Her music can be found on Bandcamp and Soundcloud.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all sentient beings. Her work in this lifetime is to facilitate infinite, unstoppable ancestral love in practice. Her poetic work in response to the needs of her cherished communities has held space for multitudes in mourning and movement. Alexis’s co-edited volume Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (PM Press, 2016) has shifted the conversation on mothering, parenting and queer transformation. Alexis has transformed the scope of intellectual, creative and oracular writing with her triptych of experimental works published by Duke University Press (Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity in 2016, M Archive: After the End of the World in 2018 and Dub: Finding Ceremony, 2020.) Unlike most academic texts, Alexis’s work has inspired artists across form to create dance works, installation work, paintings, processionals, divination practices, operas, quilts and more.

All of Alexis’s work is grounded in a community building ethic and would not be possible without her communities of accountability in Durham, NC the broader US Southeast and the global south. As a co-founder member of UBUNTU A Women of Color Survivor-Led Coalition to End Gendered Violence, Warrior Healers Organizing Trust and Earthseed Land Collective in Durham, NC, a member of the first visioning council of Kindred Southern Healing Justice Network and a participant in Southerners on New Ground, Allied Media Projects, Black Women’s Blueprint and the International Black Youth Summit for more than a decade she brings a passion for the issues that impact oppressed communities and an intimate knowledge of the resilience of movements led by Black, indigenous, working class women and queer people of color. Her writings in key movement periodicals such as Make/Shift, Left Turn, The Abolitionist, Ms. Magazine, and the collections Abolition Now, The Revolution Starts at Home, Dear Sister and the Transformative Justice Reader have offered clarity and inspiration to generations of activists.

Alexis work with her primary collaborator Sangodare has shown the world a Queer Black Feminist Love Ethic in practice. Over the past 11 years they have nurtured the Mobile Homecoming Project, an experiential archive amplifying generations of Black LGBTQ Brilliance which has consisted of listening tour of the United States (in a 1988 Winnebago!) 7 intergenerational retreats and pilgrimages in the Southeast US, a media and audio archive of many Black Feminist LGBTQ elders and is now in the land stewardship phase of building a living library and archive that serves as an all ages independent and assisted living community of intergenerational learning and love. Sangodare and Alexis are also the co-founders of Black Feminist Film School, an initiative to screen, study and produce films with a Black feminist ethic. Sangodare and Alexis have also collaborated on the exhibition Breathing Back at the Carrack Gallery in Durham, NC and more than 50 visits to campuses, organizations and conferences in the United States.

Alexis’s work as a media maker and her curricula for participatory digital education have been activated in 143 countries. Her digital distribution initiative BrokenBeautiful Press, her work as co-founder of Quirky Black Girls and her loving participation in the Women of Color Bloggers Network in the early 2000’s established her as one of the forerunners of the social media life of feminist critical and creative practice. Alexis has been honored with many awards from her communities of practice including being lifted up on lists such as UTNE Readers 50 Visionaries Transforming the World, The Advocate’s 40 under 40, Go Magazines 100 Women We Love, the Bitch 50 List, ColorLines 10 LGBTQ Leaders Transforming the South, Reproductive Justice Reality Check’s Sheroes and more. She is a proud recipient of the Too Sexy for 501C-3 trophy, a Black Women’s Blueprint Visionary Award and the Barnard College Outstanding Young Alumna Award.

Alexis is a 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize Winner in Poetry. Her book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals won the 2022 Whiting Award in Nonfiction.

Alexis was a 2020-2021 National Humanities Center Fellow, funded by the Founders Award, and is a 2022 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. Her most recent book Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (FSG) has been named a Publisher’s Weekly Top 10 book of 2024, A Time Magazine must read book of 2024, a Guardian book of the week and was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal in Nonfiction.

Toshi Reagon Website
Alexis Pauline Gumbs Website

Alexis Pauline Gumbs Photo Credit: Sufia Ikbal Doucet
Toshi Reagon Photo Credit: Erin Patrice O’Brien