Harlem is Nowhere

Novelist Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts on Harlem, gentrification and the power of unconscious style

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’ debut novel “Harlem is Nowhere” finds the young author discovering herself in a foreign place that seems all too familiar. Pitts moved to Harlem after completing a Fulbright Scholarship in England, and lived in the upper Manhattan neighborhood for seven years. In that time she saw a neighborhood separated from the city within which it exists become bombarded by the outside and witnessed …