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Interview by Natalie Moore, South Side Reporter, WBEZ
Ta-Nehisi Coates
National Book Award-winning author and MacArthur Fellow
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
In 2008, National Book Award-winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates went from believing that a black president was impossible, to being challenged by the sudden prospect of one. In his new book, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, Mr. Coates asks, “I remember how Obama caused me to question myself and my basic relationship with my country. All my life I had seen myself, and my people, backed into a corner, Had I been wrong?” Part memoir, part polemic, Mr. Coates offers his intimate and revealing perspective – the point of view of a young writer who begins his journey in an unemployment office in harlem and ends it in the Oval Office, interviewing Barack Obama.
We Were Eight Years in Power is a personal narrative that examines the symbiosis of Obama;s influence on American culture, Mr. Coates’ intellectual and professional growth, and the inspiring new voices, ideas, and movements that emerged together over this period. “We were eight years in power” was the lament of Reconstruction-era politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the rise of the Jim Crow south. Mr. Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic, and author of the #1 bestseller Between the World and Me, winner of the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and has received the National Magazine Award and the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.
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