Ta-Nehisi Coates is a former national correspondent at the Atlantic. He is the author of The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood; Between the World and Me; We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy; and The Water Dancer. Between the World and Me won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction and is a New York Times Bestseller. The book has been heralded by Toni Morrison and President Obama. Though Coates’s American Library in Paris Visiting Fellowship was for a novel still in progress about an African American who moves from Chicago to Paris, he was also at work on the final draft of Between the World and Me during his time in Paris, and he gave his first public reading of the text at the Library. On another night during his Fellowship, he spoke about his landmark article “The Case for Reparations” (The Atlantic) and conducted an event for teens about superheroes and comic books and their place in pop culture.

The American Library in Paris Visiting Fellowship was created in 2013 to nurture and sustain a heritage as old as the Library itself: deepening French-American understanding. The Visiting Fellowship offer writers and researchers an opportunity to pursue a creative project in Paris for a month or longer while participating actively in the life of the American Library.

The Visiting Fellowship is made possible through the generous support of The de Groot Foundation.