Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates ( TAH-nə-HAH-see; born September 30, 1975) is an American author, journalist, and activist. He gained a wide readership during his time as national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he wrote about cultural, social, and political issues, particularly regarding African Americans and white supremacy. He is politically progressive.
Coates's work has been published in numerous periodicals. He has published four nonfiction books: The Beautiful Struggle (2008), Between the World and Me (2015), We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (2017), and The Message (2024). Between the World and Me won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction. He has also written a Black Panther series and a Captain America series for Marvel Comics. His first novel, The Water Dancer, was published in 2019. In 2015, Coates received a MacArthur Fellowship.
Coates was born in Baltimore, Maryland. His father, William Paul Coates (known by his middle name), was a Vietnam War veteran, former Black Panther, publisher, and librarian. His mother, Cheryl Lynn Coates (née Waters), was a teacher. Coates's first name, Ta-Nehisi, is derived from an ancient Egyptian language name for Nubia (reconstructed as nḥsj), a region along the Nile river in present-day northern Sudan and southern Egypt.
Coates's father founded and ran Black Classic Press, a publishing company specializing in African-American titles. The Press grew out of a grassroots organization, the George Jackson Prison Movement (GJPM), which initially operated a Black bookstore called the Black Book. Later, Black Classic Press was established with a tabletop printing press in the basement of the Coates family home.
Coates's father had seven children collectively, five boys and two girls, by four women: His father's first wife had three children, his mother had two boys, and the other two women each had a child. The children were raised together in a close-knit family; most lived with their mothers and at times with their father. Coates has said that he lived with his father for the entirety of his upbringing, and that, in his family, the important overarching focus was on rearing children with values based on family, respect for elders and contributing to your community—an approach to family that was common where he grew up. Coates grew up in Baltimore's Mondawmin neighborhood during the crack epidemic.
Coates's interest in literature was instilled at an early age when his mother, in response to bad behavior, would require him to write essays. His father's work with the Black Classic Press was a huge influence. Coates has said that he read many of the books his father published. Coates also enjoyed comic books and Dungeons & Dragons during his childhood.
Coates attended a number of Baltimore-area schools, including William H. Lemmel Middle School and the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, before graduating from Woodlawn High School. He attended Howard University, leaving after five years to start a career in journalism. He is the only child in his family without a college degree. In mid-2014, Coates attended an intensive program in French at Middlebury College to prepare for a writing fellowship in Paris, France.
Coates's first journalism job was as a reporter at The Washington City Paper; his editor was David Carr. From 2000 to 2007, Coates worked as a journalist with various publications, including Philadelphia Weekly, The Village Voice, and Time. His first article for The Atlantic, "This Is How We Lost to the White Man", about Bill Cosby and conservatism, started a new, more successful, and more stable phase of his career. The article led to an appointment with a regular column for The Atlantic, a blog that was popular, influential, and had a high level of community engagement.
Coates became a senior editor at The Atlantic, for which he wrote feature articles as well as his blog. Topics covered by the blog included politics, history, race, culture, sports, and music. His writings on race, such as his September 2012 The Atlantic cover piece "Fear of a Black President" and his June 2014 feature "The Case for Reparations", have been especially praised, and won his blog a place on the Best Blogs of 2011 list by Time magazine and the 2012 Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis Journalism from The Sidney Hillman Foundation. His blog was praised for its engaging comments section, which Coates curated and moderated heavily so that "the jerks are invited to leave [and] the grown-ups to stay and chime in".
Coates said he worked on "The Case for Reparations" for almost two years. He had read Rutgers University professor Beryl Satter's book Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America, a history of redlining that included a discussion of the grassroots organization the Contract Buyers League, of which Clyde Ross was a leader. The article focused not so much on reparations for slavery as on the institutional racism of housing discrimination.
Coates has worked as a guest columnist for The New York Times, having turned down an offer to become a regular columnist there. He has written for The Washington Post, the Washington Monthly, and O, The Oprah Magazine.
Coates left his position as a national correspondent for The Atlantic in 2018 after a decade with the magazine. In a memo to the staff, the editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, said: "The last few years for him have been years of significant changes. He's told me that he would like to take some time to reflect on these changes, and to figure out the best path forward, both as a person and as a writer". In November 2025, Coates was announced as a senior staff writer for Vanity Fair.
In 2008, Coates published The Beautiful Struggle, a memoir about coming of age in West Baltimore and its effect on him. In the book, he discusses the influence of his father W. Paul Coates, a former Black Panther; the prevailing street crime of the era and its effects on his older brother; his own troubled experience attending Baltimore-area schools; and his eventual graduation and enrollment in Howard University. The lack of interpersonal skills and the complexity of Coates's father sheds light on a world of absentee fathers. As Rich Benjamin wrote in a 2016 article in The Guardian, "Fatherhood is a vexed topic, particularly so for an author such as Coates", and Benjamin continued by saying: "The Beautiful Struggle makes an enduring genre cliche—the father-son relationship—unexpected and new, as well as offering a vital insight into Coates's coming of age as a man and thinker."
Coates's second book, Between the World and Me, written as a letter to his son Samori, was published in 2015. The title is drawn from a Richard Wright poem of the same name about a black man discovering the site of a lynching and becoming incapacitated with fear, creating a barrier between himself and the world. Coates said that one of the origins of the book was the death of a college friend, Prince Jones, who was shot by police in a case of mistaken identity. One of the book's themes is what physically affected African-American lives, such as their bodies being enslaved, violence that came from slavery, and various forms of institutional racism. The book won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. It was 7th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st century.
Black Panther and Captain America
In 2016, Coates wrote the sixth volume of Marvel Comics' Black Panther series, which teamed him with artist Brian Stelfreeze. Issue #1 went on sale on April 6, 2016, and sold an estimated 253,259 physical copies, the best-selling comic for the month. He also wrote a spinoff of Black Panther—Black Panther and the Crew—that ran for six issues before it was canceled. In Coates's first storyline, titled A Nation Under Our Feet, T'Challa faces a popular uprising against his monarchy. At the conclusion of the story, Wakanda is reformed into a constitutional democracy, with the Black Panther continuing as a figurehead king rather than a ruler. This series introduces a new version of The Crew, now including Storm, Luke Cage, Misty Knight, and Manifold.