1400 W Cold Spring Ln, Baltimore, MD 21209, United States
Baltimore Polytechnic Institute where Ta-Nehisi Coates studied.
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1801 Woodlawn Dr, Gwynn Oak, MD 21207, United States
Woodlawn High School where Ta-Nehisi Coates studied.
College/University
Gallery of Ta-Nehisi Coates
2400 6th St NW, Washington, DC 20059, United States
Howard University where Ta-Nehisi Coates studied.
Career
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2013
Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks at Black Panther screening in Oakland in 2013.
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2015
Ta-Nehisi Coates at The New Yorker Festival in 2015.
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2017
Ta-Nehisi Coates at the interview for Chicago magazine on January 31, 2017. Photo by Rob Hart.
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2017
606 Thayer Rd, West Point, NY 10996, United States
Ta-Nehisi Coates at the 2017 Zengerle Lecture at United States Military Academy West Point.
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2017
Ta-Nehisi Coates with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show in 2017.
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2018
Ta-Nehisi Coates at Princeton University on November 28, 2018.
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2018
Ta-Nehisi Coates at the 2018 Gordon Parks Foundation Awards Dinner & Auction.
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2018
Ta-Nehisi Coates at the South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, on March 10, 2018.
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2019
Ta-Nehisi Coates on hearing on American slavery reparations at House Judiciary Committee with Steve Cohen on June 19, 2019.
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2019
5904 York Rd, Baltimore, MD 21212, United States
Ta-Nehisi Coates with director Barry Jenkins after a screening of If Beale Street Could Talk at The Senator Theatre on January 10, 2019, in Baltimore, Maryland.
Gallery of Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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Ta-Nehisi Coates with David Carr at Boston University.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
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Ta-Nehisi Coates on Connecticut Public Radio.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates with Joy Reid.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates with Kojo Nnamdi.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates with Krista Tippett.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates on WBUR-FM. Photo by Paul Marotta.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates at Penguin Random House.
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500 S State St, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, United States
Ta-Nehisi Coates at the University of Michigan.
Achievements
Membership
Awards
National Magazine Award
National Magazine Award which Ta-Nehisi Coates received in 2013.
National Book Award
National Book Award which Ta-Nehisi Coates received in 2015.
Kirkus Prize
Kirkus Prize which Ta-Nehisi Coates received in 2015.
Eisner Award
Eisner Award which Ta-Nehisi Coates received in 2018.
Ta-Nehisi Coates with director Barry Jenkins after a screening of If Beale Street Could Talk at The Senator Theatre on January 10, 2019, in Baltimore, Maryland.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood
(Paul Coates was an enigmatic god to his sons: a Vietnam v...)
Paul Coates was an enigmatic god to his sons: a Vietnam vet who rolled with the Black Panthers, an old-school disciplinarian and new-age believer in free love, an autodidact who launched a publishing company in his basement dedicated to telling the true history of African civilization. Most of all, he was a wily tactician whose mission was to carry his sons across the shoals of inner-city adolescence - and through the collapsing civilization of Baltimore in the Age of Crack - and into the safe arms of Howard University, where he worked so his children could attend for free.
(In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions...)
In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of race, a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men - bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?
(We were eight years in power was the lament of Reconstruc...)
We were eight years in power was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America’s first white president. But the story of these present-day eight years is not just about presidential politics. This book also examines the new voices, ideas, and movements for justice that emerged over this period - and the effects of the persistent, haunting shadow of our nation’s old and unreconciled history.
(Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother...)
Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her - but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known. So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North.
(A new era begins for the Black Panther! Ta-Nehisi Coates ...)
A new era begins for the Black Panther! Ta-Nehisi Coates takes the helm, confronting T'Challa with a dramatic upheaval in Wakanda that will make leading the African nation tougher than ever before. When a superhuman terrorist group calling itself The People sparks a violent uprising, the land famed for its incredible technology and proud warrior traditions will be thrown into turmoil. As suicide bombers terrorize the population, T'Challa struggles to unite his citizens, and a familiar villain steps out of the shadows. If Wakanda is to survive, it must adapt - but can its monarch, one in a long line of Black Panthers, survive the necessary change? Heavy lies the head that wears the cowl!
(Home of the Black Panther, a proud and vibrant nation who...)
Home of the Black Panther, a proud and vibrant nation whose legends and mysteries run deep. Now, delve deep into Wakanda's lore with a love story where tenderness is matched by brutality! You know them as the Midnight Angels, but for now, they are just Ayo and Aneka - young women recruited to become Dora Milaje, an elite task force trained to protect the crown of Wakanda at all costs.
(Black Panther, Storm, Luke Cage, Misty Knight, and Manifo...)
Black Panther, Storm, Luke Cage, Misty Knight, and Manifold band together to take on a dangerous wave of street-level threats in this new ongoing series by co-writers Ta-Nehisi Coates and Yona Harvey and legendary artist Butch Guice! The death of a Harlem activist kicks off a mystery that will reveal surprising new secrets about the Marvel Universe's past and set the stage for a big story in the Marvel Universe's near future. Fear, hate and violence loom, but don't worry, The Crew's got this: "We are the streets."
Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates is an American essayist, journalist, and writer who often explores contemporary race relations, perhaps most notably in his book Between the World and Me (2015). He also contributed to some publications including The New York Times Magazine and The Washington Post.
Background
Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates was born on September 30, 1975, in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. He is the son of William Paul Coates and Cheryl Lynn. He has six siblings. The important overarching focus in their family was on rearing children with values based on family, respect for elders and being a productive member of the society.
Coates’s unusual first name was an Egyptian appellation for the ancient African region of Nubia. Father Paul Coates had six other children. He grew up in a house where books were everywhere. At an early age his mother, in response to his bad behavior, would require him to write essays. He read comics incessantly and was obsessed with superheroes, with people who secretly possessed power that could remake the world.
Education
Coates attended a number of Baltimore-area schools, including William H. Lemmel Middle School and Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, before graduating from Woodlawn High School. He started writing poetry at school, at the age of 17.
After high school, in 1993 he enrolled in Howard University, but he left after five years without a degree. He is the only child in his family who has no college degree.
Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote from 2000 till 2007 for a variety of periodicals, including Washington Monthly, to which he contributed the attention-grabbing essay Confessions of a Black Mr. Mom; Philadelphia Weekly; Mother Jones; the Village Voice; Entertainment Weekly; Time; and O, the Oprah Magazine. His career blossomed when in 2008 he became a blogger for The Atlantic magazine's Web site. In his first byline, he criticized actor Bill Cosby - the patriarch of an upwardly mobile black family in the television sitcom The Cosby Show - as a crabby lecture-circuit grandpa who cast aspersions on his less fortunate brethren. Coates’s grasp of pop-culture trends and his penetrating insights earned him a following.
Coates became a senior editor at The Atlantic, for which he wrote feature articles as well as maintaining his blog. Topics covered by the blog included politics, history, race, culture as well as sports, and music. His 2008 Time article "Obama and the Myth of the Black Messiah" reminded readers that the election of Barack Obama as the first black U.S. president was not the cure-all for poverty and ghettos. In his 2012 essay on the shooting death of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, he commended Obama on his heartfelt response to the tragedy.
In 2008 Coates published his first book, the memoir The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood. The critically acclaimed work was followed by Between the World and Me (2015), which became a best seller. It was written in the form of a letter from Coates to his teenage son and recounts the author’s childhood in Baltimore’s inner city, his daily fear of violence, and the emergence of the crack cocaine epidemic. The narrative leads to the controversial contention that American society is structured to promote white supremacy. Many readers noted the book’s relevance in a time of frequent high-profile racial incidents.
In the essay collection We Were Eight Years in Power (2017), which included work previously published in The Atlantic, Coates explored the presidency of Barack Obama as well as the subsequent election of Donald Trump. Coates made a study of the 44th president, including interviewing him. This collection reflects on race, America, Obama’s presidency, and its immediate aftermath. This continuous intellectual engagement fed his nonfiction and fiction at the same time.
In addition to his nonfiction work, Coates wrote a comic series based on the Marvel superhero Black Panther. The first installment was published in 2016. He was also a visiting professor for writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012-2014. In 2018 Coates left his position at The Atlantic. His recent book The Water Dancer (2019) is about an enslaved man whose life is altered by a near-death experience. Coates is currently working on several projects. These include a television project about Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement titled America in the King Years. Coates will also adapt Rachel Aviv's 2014 New Yorker article Wrong Answer into a full-length feature film.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is the recipient of Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism for "Fear of a Black President", George Polk Award for Commentary for "The Case for Reparations", Harriet Beecher Stowe Center Prize for Writing to Advance Social Justice for "The Case for Reparations", National Book Award and Kirkus prize for Nonfiction for Between the World and Me, PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, Dayton Literary Peace Prize in Nonfiction for We Were Eight Years in Power, and Eisner Award for Best Limited Series, for Black Panther: World of Wakanda. He was also a visiting fellow of the American Library in Paris in 2015 and a fellow of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
(Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother...)
2019
Politics
Ta-Nehisi Coates thinks that it takes not just a certain kind of politician but a certain kind of African American politician to go into some of the white communities that Barack Obama went into, to speak the way he spoke. He thinks Obama made black folks feel proud.
For Ta-Nehisi Coates, under Donald Trump, there is tolerance for white mediocrity and there’s no tolerance for black mediocrity. Trump's ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. He thinks many of Trump’s actions seem motivated by the idea of merely reversing something that Barack Obama did.
Views
Creative nonfiction, he thinks, is not up to the task of humanizing, that is not what it is for.
One of the origins of the book Between the World and Me was the death of his college friend, Prince Carmen Jones Jr., who was shot by police in a case of mistaken identity.
Quotations:
"Life is always a problem."
"My ambition was to practice poetry. Then I found journalism but that other voice never fled from me."
"I love being part of some bigger arc and bigger story."
"There’s something in black music, and I guess music, period, that expresses feeling that can’t be spoken or written. And I felt like in writing about slavery, I was going for a kind of emotion I didn’t quite know how to express."
"Music was like an audio cue for me. It would take me to the place I needed to go."
"But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of the hierarchy. The difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible - this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white."
"But all our phrasing - race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy - serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body."
"I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free."
"Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others."
"Our art is made in cities like New York by people who are running from other places. They feel as misfits who were trapped in dead-end suburbs. They hated high school. Their parents did not understand. They are seeking a better world. And when they realize that the world is wholly a problem, that the whole problem is in them, they make television for other people who are also running, who take a voyage in search of a perfect world, then rage at the price of the ticket."
Membership
In 2016, Coates was made a member of Phi Beta Kappa at Oregon State University.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"He’s one of those people who looks young at any age: There’s a kind of weightlessness and buoyancy in the way he holds himself, with a serious, clear eye that looks knowing and hesitant all at once. He also has a babyface." - Jesmyn Ward
"That world trained Coates to navigate violence with his body and his mind, pressured his inner self to become the man he is today, a man with a baby face and easy bearing whose looks belie the weapon within, a self honed to a scythe’s sharpness." - Jesmyn Ward
"Everything that makes him such a powerful and seemingly unique is a voice, was there from the beginning." - Chris Jackson
Connections
Ta-Nehisi Coates married Kenyatta Matthews in 2011. They have a son.
Father:
William Paul Coates
William Paul Coates was a librarian, entrepreneur, and publisher. He started his own press, which sought out and published works by writers of the African diaspora.
Mother:
Cheryl Lynn
Son:
Samori Maceo-Paul Coates
Wife:
Kenyatta Matthews
Kenyatta Matthews is a writer, editor, humanitarian, activist and medical professor.
