Discipline: Literature – fiction

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Discipline: Literature – fiction
Region: New York, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 2010

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a former national correspondent for The Atlantic. He is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, The Water Dancer, and Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award for nonfiction. Prior to his time at The Atlantic, Coates worked for publications such as The Village Voice and Time, and in 2015, he received a MacArthur fellowship. At The Atlantic, Coates was known for his reporting on politics and race, including his 2014 article “The Case for Reparations.”

He worked on his first novel, The Water Dancer, the story of a pre-Civil War era Virginia family, while at MacDowell.

Studios

Wood

Ta-Nehisi Coates worked in the Wood studio.

Wood Studio, given to the residency program by Mrs. Frederick Trevor Hill, was completed in 1913 in memory of Mrs. Hill’s mother, Helen Ogden Wood. Like Schelling Studio, the building is sided with large, overlapping pieces of hemlock bark. When the studio was renovated in 1995, MacDowell staff researched the origins of this unusual building material and…

Learn more