Ta-Nehisi Coates

A letter to a fifteen-year-old son. That is the form of Between the World and Me, in which Ta-Nehisi Coates tells Samori what it has meant to live in a Black body in America. Published in 2015, it won the National Book Award for Nonfiction that year and takes its title from a Richard Wright poem. Its hardest passages return to Prince Jones, a friend from Howard University who was shot by a police officer in 2000. Coates grew up in West Baltimore; his father, a former Black Panther, ran Black Classic Press out of the family basement, reprinting Black authors who had gone out of print. Coates left Howard without a degree and made his name in magazines, notably with The Case for Reparations in The Atlantic in 2014. Later work includes Marvel's Black Panther comics, the novel The Water Dancer and the essay collection The Message.