Bestselling Author Ta-Nehisi Coates to Launch Latest Book at The Apollo

The Apollo is proud to host New York Times bestselling author, recipient of the McArthur Fellowship and former Apollo Artist-In-Residence, Ta-Nehisi Coates to discuss his new book of essays, The Message.  Coates will take audience members through his first work of non-fiction in nearly a decade, offering a diagnosis of the political and social polarization currently sweeping the globe across three powerfully resonant sites–Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine.  

As Apollo’s Artist in Residence, Coates’s work with the Apollo includes the theatrical premiere of the staged adaptation of his seminal work Between the World and Me, as well as conversations with Oprah Winfrey about his debut novel The Water Dancer; and Lupita Nyong'o and the late Chadwick Boseman about Black Panther. In 2023, he also co-curated an arts and ideas festival at The Apollo entitled [at] The Intersection, which brought together Black artists, intellectuals, creators and cultural movers including Kerry Washington, Berry Jenkins, Nikole Hannah-Jones, among others.  

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The Apollo’s In Conversation Series

The Apollo’s In Conversation series amplifies the voices of artists and thought leaders and explores the African American and African diasporic narrative. Past In Conversation artists and panels have included Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Joy Reid, Rachel Maddow, Fat Joe, John Legend, Black Thought, Oprah Winfrey, Chadwick Boseman, Edward Enninful, Lupita Nyong’o and more.  

About The Message

Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language,” but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities.  

 
In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on the banning of his own book Between the World and Me and explores the larger backlash to the nation’s recent reckoning with history and deeply rooted American mythology. Finally, in the book’s longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.  
 
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.  

About Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Ta-Nehisi Coates 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 in 2015. In April 2018, Between the World And Me was adapted for the stage and premiered at the iconic Apollo Theater. In November 2020, it was adapted for film and aired on HBO, and for which Ta-Nehisi was an Executive Producer. He is the recipient of a National Magazine Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. He is currently the Sterling Brown endowed chair at Howard University in the English department and was The Apollo’s inaugural Artist-in-Residence.