Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

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 in the new program in “Ethnicity, Race, & Migration”. He earned his PhD in geography at the University of California, Berkeley, where his doctoral thesis on the culture and geography of the Caribbean was awarded the Caribbean Studies Association’s Best Dissertation Prize in 2012.

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." Recently, Jelly-Schapiro's chapter on Cuba was 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.

As a journalist, Jelly-Schapiro has covered topics including the changing politics of Cuba, the music of Bob Marley, the history of phonography, and the novels of Paule Marshall. His essay "All Over the Map", on how technology is changing people’s relationship to maps, was published by Harper's in September 2012. He has also published interviews with cultural figures including the musicians Harry Belafonte, Lady Saw, and RZA; filmmakers John Akomfrah and Joshua Oppenheimer; the painter Peter Doig; and the writers Geoff Dyer and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Jelly-Schapiro is a regular contributor for the New York Review of Books, where he has written about Cuba, Haitian Masons, and the devastating effects of Hurricane Maria on the Caribbean. More recently, during the 2018 World Cup, Jelly-Schapiro guest edited a series of essays produced by writers around the world on their respective national teams. Jelly-Schapiro is a soccer enthusiast who grew up playing the game and supports Arsenal.

For the Criterion Collection, Jelly-Schapiro has contributed essays on classics of world cinema such as Memories of Underdevelopment and Buena Vista Social Club. In 2018, he collaborated with the British artist Chris Ofili on the catalogue essay for Ofili's "Paradise Lost," a volume containing Ofili's photographs of the island of Trinidad, which is accompanied by Jelly-Schapiro's essay on the cultural history of chain-link fencing.

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."

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro (born June 16, 1979) is an American geographer and writer. He is the author of Island People: The Caribbean and the World (2016) and the co-editor, with the writer Rebecca Solnit, of 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.