Ta-Nehisi Coates was born in 1975 and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. His father served in Vietnam and was a member of the Black Panthers before becoming a librarian and publisher. His mother was a teacher. Reading and writing were important to Coates early on. When he had done something wrong, his mother would require him to write essays as part of his punishment, and his father’s work as a publisher meant that the house was always full of books. He graduated from the public schools in Baltimore and spent five years studying at Howard University before leaving without a degree to write full time.

As a journalist, Coates worked for the Washington City Paper, the Village Voice, and Time. After publishing an essay in The Atlantic, he became a regular columnist for the magazine and subsequently became an editor and national correspondent. His writing at The Atlantic earned praise and a large readership. “The Case for Reparations” led to Coates’s blog being included in the list of Best Blogs of 2011 by Time magazine. In 2018, after a decade at The Atlantic, Coates left to pursue other writing opportunities. As of 2020, he is a writer-in-residence at the Arthur L.