Christina Sharpe, the influential author and intellectual who sees America as it is
Sharpe reshapes words and concepts to better know Blackness and the United States


In early April, Christina Sharpe, the creative nonfiction author and professor at York University in Toronto, won the prestigious Windham Campbell prize. The prize givers wrote, "recalibrating images of Black existence, Christina Sharpe’s incisive, multi-layered work demands that we wrestle with brutality as we create meaning through language and art."
Prizes are all well and good, especially when they come with an unrestricted grant of $175,000. For Sharpe's admirers — and those fans are legion and include the authors, playwrights and artists Alexander Chee, Lynn Nottage and Simone Leigh — such a gift promises that Sharpe will continue thinking and writing. Who is the woman who inspires such accolades and devotion?
'A new intellectual renaissance'
Christina Sharpe was born in Pennsylvania. Her father died while Sharpe was young, and her mother, Ida, became caretaker, instilling in Sharpe a love of beauty and words. There was little disposable income so "in lieu of trips to the ballet or theater, Ida hosted Sunday salons where she served poundcake and tea, and mother and daughter read poetry to each other," said J Wortham in a profile of Sharpe in the New York Times Magazine.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Sharpe received a PhD in English from Cornell University, then taught at Tufts University, where she was the first Black woman to receive tenure in the English department. Her goal with her writing, as she noted in the video accompanying her Windham Campbell award: "Black people have deep theoretical understandings of the conditions under which we are living, and it was important to me to write books that spoke to those conditions."
Her second book, "In the Wake: On Blackness and Being," published in 2016 by Duke University Press, began to trickle across the Black intellectual wires. Sharpe unpacks the word "wake," tying its denotations and connotations to Blackness and Black life. The Middle Passage, the ripple effects of centuries of subjugation, funerals. Sharpe's readers were stupefied. "As a Black woman who works in publishing, I recognize what I'm seeing to be rare," said poet and writer Hafizah Augustus Geter about "In the Wake" in Harper's Bazaar. "Through this single text, I am witnessing a new intellectual renaissance. One that, in real time, I can track. I can trace In the Wake's wake in HBO's 'Watchmen,' in the movie 'Sorry to Bother You' and in Questlove's documentary, 'Summer of Soul.'" It is as though with Sharpe's clear-eyed perceptivity, a generation of thinkers and artists now had the intellectual framework to set into motion their own work.
'Ordinary Notes;' extraordinary care
Sharpe's latest work, "Ordinary Notes," is a collection of 248 vignettes that meld the personal, the theoretical and the historical. The book's unconventional structure was intentional. "I think what I wanted the notes to do was to build and accumulate, and thereby make an argument without my having to work an argument through in the ways that I have been taught to as an academic," Sharpe said during an episode of the literary podcast "Between the Covers."
In "Ordinary Notes," she considers and reconsiders her past, her hometown of Wayne, Pennsylvania, her tender relationship with her mother. She also upends presuppositions, as with Note 56: "I am annoyed by the phrase 'Black excellence.' It doesn't do the affirming work that many people who deploy it imagine that it does.… 'Black excellence' is the answer to a racist question."
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
Such is how Sharpe thinks: She liberates individuals and Black people in particular as she explodes meaning. When New York Times Magazine writer J Wortham sat in on one of Sharpe's class lectures, Sharpe held up a copy of Toni Morrison's novel "Beloved," and "read the title aloud: 'Beloved.' She paused and reframed the word for us. 'Be loved.' The name of the book, Sharpe told the class, is 'an injunction, a command, a wish, a plea, a lamentation.' To love the self, to believe the self worthy of love and to let that love radiate out and fill up others around you."
An acute thinker and visual arts enthusiast, Sharpe is attuned to both the communal and community. In her acceptance video for the Windham Campbell prize, she paraphrased a section from "In the Wake." "We Black people may have been constituted through — and by — overwhelming violence and force, but we are not known only to ourselves and to each other by that force."
Scott Hocker is an award-winning freelance writer and editor at The Week Digital. He has written food, travel, culture and lifestyle stories for local, national and international publications for more than 20 years. Scott also has more than 15 years of experience creating, implementing and managing content initiatives while working across departments to grow companies. His most recent editorial post was as editor-in-chief of Liquor.com. Previously, he was the editor-in-chief of Tasting Table and a senior editor at San Francisco magazine.
-
What to know before turning to AI for financial advice
the explainer It can help you crunch the numbers — but it might also pocket your data
-
Book reviews: 'The Headache: The Science of a Most Confounding Affliction—and a Search for Relief' and 'Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run'
Feature The search for a headache cure and revisiting Springsteen's 'Born to Run' album on its 50th anniversary
-
Keith McNally' 6 favorite books that have ambitious characters
Feature The London-born restaurateur recommends works by Leo Tolstoy, John le Carré, and more
-
Book reviews: 'The Headache: The Science of a Most Confounding Affliction—and a Search for Relief' and 'Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of "Born to Run"'
Feature The search for a headache cure and revisiting Springsteen's 'Born to Run' album on its 50th anniversary
-
Keith McNally's 6 favorite books that have ambitious characters
Feature The London-born restaurateur recommends works by Leo Tolstoy, John le Carré, and more
-
Book reviews: 'King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution' and 'Gwyneth: The Biography'
Feature How the Iranian Revolution began and Gwyneth Paltrow's life in the spotlight
-
Garrett Graff's 6 favorite books that shine new light on World War II
Feature The author recommends works by James D. Hornfischer, Craig L. Symonds, and more
-
5 fun cycling tours that let you vacation on two wheels
The Week Recommends Gain a new perspective while pedaling
-
A descent into academic Hell, a ferocious feminist fable and the adult debut of a beloved children's author
The Week Recommends August books include R.F. Kuang's 'Katabasis,' Xenobe Purvis' 'The Hounding' and Louis Sachar's 'The Magician of Tiger Castle'
-
Book reviews: 'Face With Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji' and 'Blood Harmony: The Everly Brothers Story'
Feature The surprising history of emojis and the brother duo who changed pop music
-
Helen Schulman's 6 favorite collections of short stories
Feature The award-winning author recommends works by Raymond Carver, James Baldwin, and more