Theater video tags: Ta-Nehisi Coates

“I wanted to center the emotions and the feelings of the actual enslaved people.” Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks about what inspired him to write his debut novel, The Water Dancer (One World, 2019), as he walks through Thomas Jefferson’s estate, Monticello, with Gayle King for CBS This Morning.

“I report, that is my profession. I report, as a loud noise testifies to a gun.” Upon the posthumous publication of Doctorow: Collected Stories (Random House, 2017), Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jennifer Egan read from E. L. Doctorow’s short stories in celebration of his life and work at the 92nd Street Y.

"Within that economy of words, you choose words that have certain angles, that have certain edges, that effect people in a certain way." Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose memoir Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015) is a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, speaks with Khalil Gibran Muhammad about what he learned as a poet and how those skills continue to influence his writing.