Ta-Nehisi Coates in conversation with Leonard Pitts, Jr.

Due to the severe tropical weather forecast for Florida this week, Ta-Nehisi Coates is unable to travel to Miami as planned and the October 8 event is now postponed.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of the most commanding journalists and essayists working today, returns to the Arsht Center for a conversation about his new book, The Message, in which he travels to Senegal, Palestine and South Carolina to map the distance between nationalist myths and historical and contemporary realities. Leonard Pitts, Jr., a nationally syndicated columnist and winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, will moderate the discussion.  

Coates’ bold, literary and deeply researched work has garnered him a National Book Award, the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grant” and a National Magazine Award, among other accolades. A former national correspondent with The Atlantic, Coates reached No. 1 on The New York Times’ Best Sellers list in 2015 with Between the World and Me, a vital look at race in America written as a letter to his teenage son. His 2020 novel, The Water Dancer, also topped The New York Times’ Best Sellers list and was an Oprah’s Book Club pick. The Message will be published October 1 by Penguin Random House.

Coates is also the author of the essay collection We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (which includes the groundbreaking 2014 essay “The Case for Reparations”), the memoir The Beautiful Struggle and a series of Black Panther graphic novels for Marvel.

Each full-price ticket includes a copy of The Message. If you’d like one book per pair of tickets, select the “Book Included With Every Other Ticket” option to purchase a second ticket for $10 plus fees. The non-book ticket savings will be reflected in the shopping cart.