AAG Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography

Presented annually to an individual geographer or team who has demonstrated originality, creativity, and significant intellectual breakthroughs in geography. Previous awardees have included Kathryn Yusoff, Dawn Wright, Brian Berry, Janice Monk, Mei-Po Kwan, David Harvey, Michael Goodchild, Susan Hansen, Robert Kates, and the inaugural recipient, Yi-Fu Tuan.

Katherine McKittrick

As a foundational voice for Black geographies and Black methods of knowledge creation, Dr. McKittrick has re-imagined scholarship to be both documentation and instigation in modes that are poetic, sonic, material, and rhetorical. In every new, surprising iteration, her work offers “curiosity, wonder, citations, numbers, playlists, friendship, poetry, inquiry, song, grooves, and anticolonial chronologies as interdisciplinary codes that entwine with the academic form,” according to Duke University Press.

Katherine McKittrick is professor of Gender Studies and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. She is the author of Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press 2021), which both analyzes and challenges scientific practice for its inherent ties to colonialism and anti-Blackness. Her 2006 book Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle has had a lasting impact on both Black and feminist studies since its publication by University of Minnesota Press. She has also contributed dozens of scholarly articles and edited and contributed to Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Duke University Press, 2015).

McKittrick continually probes the boundaries and possibilities between scholarship and imagination, challenging conventionalized methods and demonstrating the range and collective power of all ways to knowledge creation, particularly Black knowledge creation. In 2023, McKittrick published Trick Not Telos, a boxed set of texts that takes its initial inspiration from Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s reading of McKittrick’s “Plantation Futures” (Small Axe 2013, 17: 3). Although the project was initially conceived as a modest response, it grew into a creative meditation—with designer Cristian Ordóñez, project curator Liz Ikiriko, and French translator Lyse Hébert—on the nature of reiteration, revision, bibliography, and translation. In 2024, she published Twenty Dreams (2024), a limited-edition hand-made book; and is preparing an installation honoring nourbeSe philip, A Smile Split by the Stars (2025).