Skip to Main Content
Son of a teacher and a librarian, Coates became interested in literature early through exposure to books and learning to read at age four. By the 2000s he was publishing in a wide range of magazines that included O, the Oprah Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, and Time, and blogging for the Atlantic. In those magazines he had a succession of hard-hitting political articles that sent ripples through the U.S., such as "The Case for Reparations," "Confessions of a Black Mr. Mom," "Fear of a Black President," and "Obama and the Myth of the Black Messiah". His reputation was cemented by his 2008 autobiographical book The Beautiful Struggle, written to tell his teenaged son about Coates' life growing up in crime- and drug-ridden Baltimore. His first novel was published in 2019, and he has also written for the Marvel comic book series Black Panther.
Trethewey was born to a mixed-race couple in Mississippi at a time when her parents' marriage was still illegal in the state. Following her parents' divorce her mother remarried a man who was abusive to both Trethewey and her mother, and who eventually would murder her mother. Trethewey turned to writing, particularly poetry, to process the deep trauma the abuse and murder caused her, getting an MA at Hollins in 1991 and eventually publishing several collections of autobiographical poetry, including Domestic Work, which was also based on the working lives of her grandmother and other African-Americans in the South. Her works explore race, racial mixing, unsung African-American heroism, historical roots, and the idea of permanence--what is remembered and what is forgotten. She served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States from 2012 to 2014, during which she sought out "the many ways poetry lives in American communities and reported on her discoveries in a regular feature on the PBS New Hour Poetry Series" (Poets.org). In 2007 she won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
