A photo of author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Resident Company

Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Message

Chicago Humanities Festival

Performances

Oct 16

Performance Run Time: 60 minutes

A discussion on the stories we tell moderated by Dr. Eve L. Ewing

Join us for an evening with acclaimed National Book Award Winner and MacArthur Fellow author Ta-Nehisi Coates as he discusses his latest work, The Message. Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths. This live engagement offers an opportunity to hear directly from one of today's most influential voices on the Black experience as he unpacks the complexities and urgencies within his new book.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is an award-winning author and journalist. He is the author of the bestselling books The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, The Water Dancer, and Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award in 2015. He was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship that same year. As a journalist with a career spanning over two decades, he’s written for numerous publications including The Washington City Paper, The Village Voice, The New Yorker and The New York Times. During his time reporting for The Atlantic between 2008-2018, he penned numerous articles and essays, including the National Magazine Award-winning 2012 essay “Fear of a Black President” and the influential June 2014 essay “The Case For Reparations.” Ta-Nehisi also enjoyed a successful run writing Marvel’s Black Panther (2016-2021) and Captain America (2018-2021) comics series. Ta-Nehisi is currently writing the screenplays for the upcoming films Wrong Answer, Superman and the film adaptation of his first fiction novel, The Water Dancer. In the fall of 2022, he joined Howard University’s faculty as a writer-in-residence and the Sterling Brown Chair in the Department of English.

Dr. Eve L. Ewing is a writer, scholar, and cultural organizer from Chicago. She is the award-winning author of four books: the poetry collections Electric Arches and 1919, the nonfiction work Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side, and a novel for young readers, Maya and the Robot. She is the co-author (with Nate Marshall) of the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. She has written several projects for Marvel Comics, most notably the Ironheart series and Black Panther, and is currently writing Exceptional X-Men. Ewing is an associate professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and many other venues. Her next book, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism, will be published by One World in February 2025.