Nicole R. Fleetwood is a writer, art curator and professor at New York University. A MacArthur Fellow, she is the author MARKING TIME: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, winner of the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other books include ON RACIAL ICONS and TROUBLING VISION. She has curated exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Art and Practice (LA), the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Brown Arts Institute, Aperture Foundation and Zimmerli Museum of Art.

Her work has been supported by Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, American Council of Learned Societies, the Art for Justice Fund, Mellon Foundation, the Gordon Parks Foundation, Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library, Whiting Foundation, Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture, Ford Foundation and Denniston Hill Residency. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Books by Nicole R. Fleetwood

Between the River and the Railroad Tracks: A Memoir

by Nicole R. Fleetwood - Memoir, Nonfiction

In 1973, Hamilton, Ohio, was a mill town so typical it prided itself on being quintessentially American. Here, young Nicole is born into a fourth-generation household in the Second Ward, a segregated neighborhood between the river and the railroad tracks. In this tight-knit community, most of Nicole’s neighbors are like her relatives: large, intergenerational families a few decades up from the South. But the legacy of slavery and the entrenched racism of the Midwest cast a shadow over the Second Ward. As Nicole grows up, she witnesses the Second Ward undergo devastating changes that impact her family and neighbors. Nicole nurtures her intellectual curiosity and independence, dreaming of college and the world beyond. But she fears that leaving the Second Ward means abandoning everything she’s known --- the community that raised her and the family that loves her.