Two Black Scholars Win National Book Awards
Filed in Books, Honors & Awards on November 20, 2015
Ta-Nehisi Coates, a national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, won the National Book Award in the nonfiction category from the National Book Foundation. Coates was honored for his Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015). The book is a memoir of his life as a Black man in America.
Coates has served as a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Management. Coates attended Howard University in Washington, D.C. Earlier this year, he was named a MacArthur Fellow. An earlier book by Coates is The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir (Spiegel & Grau, 2008).
Robin Coste Lewis, a Provost’s Fellow in the creative writing and literature doctoral program at the University of Southern California, won the National Book Award in the poetry category. She was honored for poetry collection Voyage of the Sable Venus: And Other Poems (Alfred F. Knopf, 2015).
Lewis received a master of fine arts degree from New York University’s creative writing program where she was a Goldwater Fellow in poetry. She also holds a master’s of theological studies degree in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from Harvard Divinity School.
