Ashon Crawley

Ashon T. Crawley is an American scholar of religion, author, and multidisciplinary artist. He is Professor of Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia and 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 on love, blackness, mysticism, and quantum theory. The Lonely Letters won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction and the Believer Book Award for nonfiction Crawley is currently working on two books about the Hammond Organ’s historical role in the 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, completed his PhD at Duke University.