Christina
Sharpe
Christina Sharpe is a writer, professor, and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University. Sharpe is the author of Monstrous Intimacies and In the Wake, which was named by The Guardian and The Walrus as one of the best books of 2016. Her third book, Ordinary Notes, won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and was named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Globe and Mail, NPR, New York Magazine, and Granta. Sharpe 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.
