Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe

In a series of 248 brief and urgent notes, Christina Sharpe explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that form in the wake.
Sharpe is the winner of the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.
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"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."
-2023 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction Jury (Eve Joseph, Michelle Porter, and Dan Werb)