1. Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates is an American author, journalist, and activist.
39 Facts About Ta-Nehisi Coates
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Ta-Nehisi Coates gained a wide readership during his time as national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he wrote about cultural, social, and political issues, particularly regarding African Americans and white supremacy.
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In 2015, Coates received a MacArthur Fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates has published four nonfiction books: The Beautiful Struggle, Between the World and Me, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, and The Message.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a Black Panther series and a Captain America series for Marvel Comics.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates's father, William Paul Coates, was a Vietnam War veteran, former Black Panther, publisher, and librarian.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates's mother, Cheryl Lynn Coates, was a teacher.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates's father founded and ran Black Classic Press, a publishing company specializing in African-American titles.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates's father had seven children collectively, five boys and two girls, by four women: His father's first wife had three children, his mother had two boys, and the other two women each had a child.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates has said that he lived with his father for the entirety of his upbringing, and that, in his family, the important overarching focus was on rearing children with values based on family, respect for elders, contributing to your community, an approach to family that was common where he grew up.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates grew up in Baltimore's Mondawmin neighborhood during the crack epidemic.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates's father's work with the Black Classic Press was a huge influence.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates has said that he read many of the books his father published.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates attended Howard University, leaving after five years to start a career in journalism.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates is the only child in his family without a college degree.
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In mid-2014, Ta-Nehisi Coates attended an intensive program in French at Middlebury College to prepare for a writing fellowship in Paris, France.
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From 2000 to 2007, Ta-Nehisi Coates worked as a journalist with various publications, including Philadelphia Weekly, The Village Voice, and Time.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates became a senior editor at The Atlantic, for which he wrote feature articles as well as his blog.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates said he worked on his article "The Case for Reparations" for almost two years.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates had read Rutgers University professor Beryl Satter's book Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America, a history of redlining that included a discussion of the grassroots organization the Contract Buyers League, of which Clyde Ross was a leader.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates has worked as a guest columnist for The New York Times, having turned down an offer to become a regular columnist there.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates has written for The Washington Post, the Washington Monthly, and O, The Oprah Magazine.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates left his position as a national correspondent for The Atlantic in 2018 after a decade with the magazine.
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In 2008, Ta-Nehisi Coates published The Beautiful Struggle, a memoir about coming of age in West Baltimore and its effect on him.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates said that one of the origins of the book was the death of a college friend, Prince Jones, who was shot by police in a case of mistaken identity.
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In 2016, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote the sixth volume of Marvel Comics' Black Panther series, which teamed him with artist Brian Stelfreeze.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates interprets the story as a fascinating deconstruction of Wakanda that removes "what [Coates] might call the intellectual crutch of Black nationalism" from the mythos of Black Panther.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a six-issue series called Black Panther and the Crew that addresses the problem of police killings and suggests that the Marvel universe includes a number of previously unknown superheroes from the Bandung Conference.
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In 2018, Ta-Nehisi Coates announced he would be writing a ninth volume of the Captain America series, teaming him with artists Leinil Yu and Alex Ross; in that volume, he depicted the Nazi supervillain Red Skull espousing the writings of the Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates added essays written especially for the book bridging the gaps between the previously published essays, as well as an introduction and an epilogue.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates sees parallels between that period and the Obama presidency.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates joined the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism as its journalist-in-residence in late 2014.
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In 2017, Coates joined the faculty of New York University's Arthur L Carter Journalism Institute as a Distinguished Writer in Residence.
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In February 2021, it was reported that Ta-Nehisi Coates had been hired to write the script of a new Superman feature film from DC Films and Warner Bros.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates compared the segregation between Palestinians and Israeli settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories to Jim Crow laws in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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In 2009, Ta-Nehisi Coates lived in Harlem with his wife, Kenyatta Matthews, and son, Samori Maceo-Paul Ta-Nehisi Coates.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates's son's name is a reference to three people: Samori Ture, a Mande chief who fought French colonialism, black Cuban revolutionary Antonio Maceo Grajales, and Coates's father, who was known by his middle name of Paul.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates met his wife when they were both students at Howard University.
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In 2016, Ta-Nehisi Coates was made a member of Phi Beta Kappa at Oregon State University.