Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is a writer whose work has appeared in Transition, New York Times Magazine, New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Boston Globe, Transition, and Times Literary Supplement.

She has received awards from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Originally from Houston, Texas, she graduated in 2000 from Harvard University and was a Fulbright Scholar in the United Kingdom. Sharifa is writing a trilogy on African-Americans and utopia; her first book, Harlem is Nowhere, was published in January 2011 by Little, Brown & Company.  (photo by Emily Raboteau).

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts photo courtesy of Wide Vision Photography

Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America
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Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company (January 26, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 031601723X
ISBN-13: 978-0316017237
Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.2 x 8.8 inches

For a century Harlem has been celebrated as the capital of black America, a thriving center of cultural achievement and political action. At a crucial moment in Harlem's history, as gentrification encroaches, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts untangles the myth and meaning of Harlem's legacy. Examining the epic Harlem of official history and the personal Harlem that begins at her front door, Rhodes-Pitts introduces us to a wide variety of characters, past and present. At the heart of their stories, and her own, is the hope carried over many generations, hope that Harlem would be the ground from which blacks fully entered America's democracy.

Rhodes-Pitts is a brilliant new voice who, like other significant chroniclers of places-Joan Didion on California, or Jamaica Kincaid on Antigua-captures the very essence of her subject.

Related Links

Official Website
http://sharifarhodespitts.com/

Harlem Revisited: PW Talks with Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
http://aalbc.it/sharifa_pw

New York Times Artcile - "Young Writer Searches for Harlem"
http://aalbc.it/sharifa_nyt

"Lenox Terminal" by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
the essay that led to HARLEM IS NOWHERE. Published in Transition magazine, 2004
http://www.transitionmagazine.com/articles/lenox.htm

by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

Most everything I write here is true and happened on or around Lenox Avenue. This is where I live now; if you stand at its center, the crossing at 125th Street, and look north and then south, you’ll see it come to a dead stop at both ends. It begins at the top of the park, where you can see the Harlem Meer, where I saw fireflies in summer and where each winter, I am told, teenagers drown trying to walk across the half-frozen ice. When I first moved here, to 120th Street, I was happy to be close to this secret, manmade lake, with its Dutch name, Haarlem Meer, the Lake of Harlem. Lenox Avenue begins there at 110th Street and ends up at 149th Street or so; I have never been to the very end of it. At the end a bridge goes over the Harlem River and then suddenly it is the Bronx. The Harlem River is not a real river, just as the Harlem Meer is not a sea or even a real lake, and Lenox Avenue is technically Sixth Avenue. Downtown it is called Avenue of the Americas before it runs into the south end of the park, and up town it is called Malcolm X Boulevard, but only by the kind of person who insists on calling Bombay Mumbai or Calcutta Kolkata. They would also feel the need to call Eighth Avenue, Frederick Douglass Boulevard and Seventh Avenue, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Boulevard. One Hundred Twenty-Fifth Street is also called Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, but I’ve never heard anyone insist upon it. I don’t call any of these by their second names. The point is that Lenox Avenue doesn’t go anywhere, and yet it is thought to be the most important thoroughfare of the most important place for black people in America, if not the world.