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’
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