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From a marine biologist and co-founder of Minorities in Shark Sciences, a powerful debut memoir: the uplifting story of a young Black scientist's challenging journey to flourish outside the traditional confines of academia, inspired by her innate connection to nature's most misunderstood animal – the shark.
You never forget your first shark. For Jasmin Graham, it was a little bonnethead, a type of hammerhead shark: three feet long, grey with a white underbelly, rough-skinned, strongly muscled, and beautiful. Jasmin fell in love: with sharks, and with science. Though she tried to follow the traditional path to becoming a marine biologist, she soon found that, in a field where it was harder to find other young women of colour than the elusive Elasmobranchii (sharks, rays, skates, and sawfish) she sought, navigating the choppy waters of traditional academic study was no longer worth it.
So Jasmin quit. But that didn't mean abandoning her passion: rather, Jasmin sought to pursue it in another way, joining with three other Black women to form Minorities in Shark Sciences (MISS), an organization dedicated to providing support and opportunities for other young women of colour pursuing the fascinating and environmentally essential work of marine studies. Jasmin became an independent researcher: a rogue shark scientist, learning how to keep those endangered but precious sharks swimming free – just like her.
Sharks Don't Sink is a riveting, moving, and ultimately triumphant memoir at the intersection of science and social justice: a guidebook to how we can all learn to respect and protect some of nature's most misunderstood and vulnerable creatures – and grant the same grace to ourselves.
Jasmin Graham is a marine biologist in the field of elasmobranch ecology and evolution, currently specializing in smalltooth sawfish and hammerhead sharks. She is the co-founder of Minorities in Shark Sciences (MISS), an organization providing support for women of colour in the field of shark biology and ecology, in order to foster greater diversity in marine science. She is a recipient of the WWF Conservation Leadership Award, the Safina Launchpad Center Fellowship, and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
