Join us in celebration of the publication of Heartbreak and Other Geographies, a thoughtfully curated selection of texts by preeminent black feminist scholar Katherine McKittrick spanning over twenty years. Edited by Brittany Meché and Camilla Hawthorne, this collection highlights McKittrick’s enduring commitment to ideas around radical placemaking and the creative articulations of and within the black diaspora. McKittrick’s work is marked by a recurring engagement with anticolonialism, practices of liberation, and radical methodologies of black cultural production. Through discussions of figures such as Toni Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Édouard Glissant, Paul Gilroy, Nina Simone, and Sylvia Wynter, the writing in Heartbreak and Other Geographies spans the author’s investigations into scientific method, liberal modernity, the cycles that perpetuate racial violence, and the poetics and sonics of black livingness. Innovative in both form and content, this wide-ranging volume invites us to rethink the boundaries between disciplines and the ways that scholarship can embody a more collaborative form of worldmaking.

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This event opens with an introduction by Simone Brown (UT Austin), followed by a reading from Katherine McKittrick (Queen’s University) and a discussion moderated by Brittany Meché (Williams College) and Camilla Hawthorne (UC Santa Cruz). Copies of Heartbreak and Other Geographies will also be available for purchase and signing, as will 20th anniversary editions of Demonic Grounds by McKittrick.

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About the Speakers

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Katherine McKittrick is professor of gender studies and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen’s University. She is author of Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minnesota, 2006 and 2026) and Dear Science and Other Stories; editor of Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis; and coeditor of Black Geographies and the Politics of Place.

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Brittany Meché is assistant professor of environmental studies at Williams College. Her writing has been published in many journals, including Political Geography, Society and Space, and Antipode.

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Camilla Hawthorne is associate professor of sociology at University of California Santa Cruz. She is author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean and coeditor of The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship and The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity.

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Simone Browne is Associate Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness.

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This program is presented in conjunction with the 2026 American Association of Geographers Conference

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