Coates, Ta-Nehisi << KOHTS, TAH nuh HAH see >> (1975-…), is an African American author, journalist, and educator who became known for writing about race relations in the United States. He won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2015 for Between the World and Me (2015). The book is in the form of a letter to Coates’s teenage son about the history of racial injustice in the United States and what it means to be Black in America. Coates wrote the book in response to the killing of an African American college friend who was shot to death by a police officer who mistook him for a criminal. The book’s publication and the accolades it garnered coincided with a growing dialogue and protests in the United States about race relations and inequality. See Eric Garner case; Ferguson protests of 2014; Police use of force; Racial profiling.
Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates was born on Sept. 30, 1975, in Baltimore, Maryland. He attended Howard University for five years but did not graduate. Coates began his journalism career at the Washington (DC) City Paper in 1996. From 2000 to 2007 he worked as a journalist for a number of publications, including Philadelphia Weekly, The Village Voice, and Time. He was a national correspondent for The Atlantic from 2008 to 2018. Eight essays Coates wrote for the magazine were collected as We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (2017). Coates has also contributed to a number of other publications. From 2012 to 2014, he was Martin Luther King, Jr., visiting scholar for writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2014, he was a journalist-in-residence at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism.
Coates wrote the memoir The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood (2008), in which he describes growing up with a father who was a member of the Black Panther Party. From 2016 to 2021, Coates wrote the Marvel comic book series “Black Panther,” initially drawn by the African American illustrator Brian Stelfreeze. The first issue of the series broke records, selling 350,000 copies in its first printing. Introduced in Marvel comics in 1966, the Black Panther was the first Black superhero in mainstream American comics. From 2018 to 2021, Coates also wrote a new “Captain America” series for Marvel. Captain America is a fictional comic superhero created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby and introduced in 1940.
Coates combined history with magical elements in his first novel, The Water Dancer (2019). The story examines racism in the United States in the mid-1800’s through the eyes of Hiram Walker, who possesses a mysterious power tied to memory and storytelling. Walker escapes from enslavement on a Virginia plantation and becomes part of the underground railroad, helping other enslaved people reach freedom.
