We could spend years talking about the impact, importance and innovations of Dr. Christina Sharpe, but the essays and articles have already been written. To many of us, she is a mentor, a friend, our first interaction with scholarship and theory that speaks to ways in which Black life is organized, disorganized and purposely made agrammatical. Her writing is both incisive and inviting, loving and exacting, particular and specific, home and refuge because as she reminds us, “sometimes, home is where the hatred is.” The work has a commitment to beauty unseen since Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison retired their pens and wen ton to Glory. Check out her groundbreaking works “In The Wake: On Blackness and Being”— which this symposium is based upon — and “Ordinary Notes.” Her faculty bio below, nor this lovely NYT feature quite do her justice; but fret not, you will get a taste of the gumbo of her brilliance on Saturday, August 10th.

— Dr. T. Anansi Wilson

Dr. Christina Sharpe is a writer, Professor, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. She is also a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC), at the University of Johannesburg. Sharpe is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010) and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016)—named by the Guardian (UK) and The Walrus as one of the best books of 2016 and a nonfiction finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her third book, Ordinary Notes (2023) won the Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize in Nonfiction and the Hodler Prize, and was a finalist for The National Book Award in Nonfiction, The National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Current Interest Book Award, and the James Tait Black Prize in Biography. Ordinary Notes was also named a Best Book of the Year by: The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, NPR, New York Magazine, and Granta, among others. Sharpe is currently working on What Could a Vessel Be? (FSG/Knopf, Canada 2025) and Black. Still. Life. (Duke 2027). Her writing has appeared in many artist catalogues and journals including Frieze, Paris Review, Harpers, BOMB Magazine, and The Funambulist. In April 2024, she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize in Nonfiction and was named a Guggenheim Fellow. In May 2024 she received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize for the Sciences and Humanities.