Christina
Sharpe
Christina Sharpe is a writer and professor. Currently, she is the Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University, a senior research associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class at the University of Johannesburg, and a Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University. In addition to Ordinary Notes, Sharpe has authored two books of nonfiction, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, which was named by The Guardian and The Walrus as one of the best books of 2016 and nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She lives in Toronto.
Award History
Jury Citation
With tenderness, bravery, and razor-sharp poetic language, Christina Sharpe invites the reader to witness the ordinary joys and sorrows of Black lives and how they are transformed within the everyday reality of systems of racial supremacy. In doing so, she creates a new narrative space at once intimate, deeply informed, and uncompromising. Guided by a deep backbone of scholarship, Ordinary Notes calls upon the reader to witness and wrestle with the notes and stories that Sharpe, a scholar and poet, so generously shares with us. To read this book is to turn toward a voice and listen as if our lives depend on it — and risk being changed in the process.
