Ashon Crawley

Ashon T. Crawley is an American religious studies scholar, author, and multidisciplinary artist. He is a professor of religious studies and African American and African studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, on aesthetics and performance as modes of social imagination, and The Lonely Letters, an epistolary, semi-autobiographical work. The Lonely Letters won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Nonfiction and the Believer Book Award for Nonfiction. Crawley is working on a book about the Hammond organ’s historical role in Black church and social life.

Education Crawley earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003, then received a Master of Theological Studies from Emory University in 2007. In 2013, he completed his PhD at Duke University.

Publications

Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, published October 3, 2016 by Fordham University Press The Lonely Letters, published April 10, 2020 by Duke University Press

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