Saidiya Hartman, who grew up in Brooklyn, holds degrees from Wesleyan and Yale and is on the faculty at Columbia University. She is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, and her essays have been widely published and anthologized. Her excerpt from Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route won the 2007 Narrative Prize. Named a 2019 MacArthur fellow, Hartman lives in New York City.
Photograph © John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.