Joshua Jelly-Schapiro (born June 16, 1979) is an American geographer and writer. Among his books are Island People: The Caribbean and the World (2016), Names of New York (2021) and, with the writer Rebecca Solnit, Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (2016). Jelly-Schapiro is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. He has also written for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Believer, Artforum, Transition, and The Nation.
Biography
Jelly-Schapiro grew up in Vermont and attended Yale University, where he studied literature and was also a member of Yale’s first graduating class its program in “Ethnicity, Race, & Migration”. He earned his PhD in geography at the University of California, Berkeley, where his doctoral thesis on the global impacts of Caribbean culture was awarded the Caribbean Studies Association’s Best Dissertation Prize in 2012.
Jelly-Schapiro lives in New York. He is a visiting scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, where he also teaches. He is editor-in-chief of Pioneer Works Broadcast, a digital and print magazine for interdisciplinary thinking, published by Pioneer Works in Red Hook.
Works
Jelly-Schapiro’s first book, Island People, was published in November 2016 by Knopf. Island People was described by Tom Gjelten in The New York Times as "a travelogue of love and scholarship", that "does the region splendid justice". In The Washington Post, Amy Wilentz wrote that "Every 50 years or so there should be a book like this one, in which a passionate, informed, dedicated and adventurous traveler skips from island to island in the bright blue palm-lined bowl and reassesses the contemporary significance of this world-historical outpost of the globe." Marlon James, Man Booker Prize winning author of A Brief History of Seven Killings, said that, while "many have tried … to get hold of, in its entirety, the volatile, beautiful, relentlessly shifting Caribbean … nobody has succeeded as dazzlingly." Jelly-Schapiro's chapters on Cuba were later expanded into a short volume, published by Penguin Random House, entitled Cuba Then, Cuba Now. The volume includes new material regarding the aftermath of Fidel Castro's death.
Nonstop Metropolis, the "imaginative atlas" of New York City that Jelly-Schapiro completed with Rebecca Solnit in 2016, was the third in a trilogy of atlases launched by Solnit in San Francisco in 2010. Consisting of 26 maps of the city, accompanied by essays and interviews, Nonstop Metropolis was described by Sadie Stein in The New York Times as "a document of its time, of our time". Maria Popova, on brainpickings.org, wrote that the atlas's maps “reveal the nature of all cities as functions of human intention with its always dual and often dueling capacities for good and evil, for revolution and repression, for power and prejudice, for creation and destruction." In April 2017, the Municipal Art Society awarded Nonstop Metropolis the Brendan Gill Prize, granted annually "to the creator of a specific work—a book, essay, musical composition, play, painting, sculpture, architectural design, film or choreographic piece—that best captures the spirit and energy of New York City." Recent winners of the Gill prize include Lin-Manuel Miranda for his play Hamilton, and the artist Kara Walker, for her sugar sculpture "A Subtlety."
Jelly-Schapiro’s book Names of New York: Discovering the City’s Past, Present, and Future Through Its Place-Names was published by Pantheon in 2021. Described as a “smorgasbord of New York City lore”, excerpts were published online in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. Reviews praised the book as “an entertaining education in the ways of a city that never stops transforming,” and the writer Jia Tolentino described it as a “a casually wondrous experience; it made me feel like the city was unfolding beneath my feet.” Names of New York is accompanied by an Instagram account @namesofny that shares excerpts from the book and additional stories behind place-names in New York City.