Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’s first book, Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America, is an intellectual journey in search of a place both real and imaginary—not just her neighborhood of Harlem, but also the idea of Harlem. It was published by Little, Brown & Co. and named among 100 Notable Books of 2011 by the New York Times Book Review and nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, New York Times Book Review, Essence, Harper's, Transition, and Vogue. She has received a Lannan Foundation fellowship and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and was a Fulbright Scholar in 2007. Rhodes-Pitts was born in Texas and educated at Harvard University.
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Harlem Is NowhereA Journey to the Mecca of Black AmericaFrom"Harlem Dream Books"
In this dream Harlem, the avenues are even wider and more grand. I visit elegant lounges that have mahogany fittings and floor-to-ceiling windows that open onto the avenue—striped silk curtains billow in the breeze. In that dream Harlem, that nowhere Harlem, I reach the campus of City College by ascending the face of a ragged cliff many times more treacherous than the steps of St. Nicholas Park. In these settings unfold various plots of which I am not quite the author.
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Harlem Is NowhereA Journey to the Mecca of Black AmericaFrom"Message"
A man came up to the row of benches and began dashing back and forth in front of us, and then into and out of the street. He was dressed in athletic clothes and possessed by a remarkable purpose: he was shadowboxing while delivering rhyming couplets.
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Harlem Is NowhereA Journey to the Mecca of Black AmericaFrom"We March Because…"
… there they are marching, and there is the man who brings a van from North Carolina loaded with sausage links, boiled peanuts, pickled eggs, and peaches and sorghum syrup and collard greens, which he sells from the street. There are the girls playing double-dutch, there is that man who kept a tiger in his apartment, and yes, oh, there is Bill Clinton, we see him so infrequently at his office on 125th Street! There is this week’s winner of Amateur Night at the Apollo, there are the Korean American owners of Harlem’s most popular chain of soul-food buffet restaurants, there are those socialites going to the fabulous Harlem Renaissance parties, which I am quite tired of hearing about. They are all gathered at the parade.
Harlem Is Nowhere:A Journey to the Mecca of Black America
“Harlem Is Nowhere is personal in a different way. Ms. Rhodes-Pitts drops us inside her wide-scanning cranium as she searches for her own version of Harlem, one she strains to see through all the graceful and angry words that have already been written about it. You climb inside her skull as if this book were a first-person thinker video game: Call of Duty: Memoir Academy.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"Rhodes-Pitts honors the dreamers imagining what Harlem could be, while never losing sight of how each of them was thwarted by the disconnect between the heaven they envisioned and the reality they lived." —Mike Fischer, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel [on Harlem Is Nowhere]
"No geographic or racial qualification guarantees a writer her subject . . . Only interest, knowledge, and love will do that—all of which this book displays in abundance." —Zadie Smith, Harper's [on Harlem Is Nowhere]
Selected Works
