A MacArthur “genius” grant to Ta-Nehisi Coates

A MacArthur “genius” grant to Ta-Nehisi Coates

Congratulations to the Library’s winter 2015 Visiting Fellow, Ta-Nehisi Coates, for winning one of the coveted MacArthur Foundation “genius” awards on the strength of his extraordinary success with this year’s most important American book, Between the World and Me. Here’s a provocative new interview with Coates by the Paris-based Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper. His view: “The most radical aspect of Coates’s work may be its lack of hope. He breaks with a longstanding American narrative: the arc of racial progress, the inevitable triumph of justice.”