Acclaimed Author Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts to Appear at Community Book Center

Among the many great artists and writers living in New Orleans, we are truly fortunate that the author Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts has made her home here. Her new book Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America, has already brought rave reviews in the New York Times, NPR, Salon, and many others. The film also has inspired a short trailer by Arthur Jafa, the acclaimed cinematographer behind Daughters of the Dust and Crooklyn, and an excellent mixtape, available for free online.

New Orleanians will get a chance to here from the author, this Thursday at 6:00pm, at Community Book Center, 2523 Bayou Road.

From the book's website:

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.