Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive” language has been hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” and The New York Observer calls him “the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States.” A MacArthur Fellow, he is author of the bestselling books The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, and Between the World and Me – an essay in the form of a letter to his son – a #1 New York Times bestseller and winner of the National Book Award and an NAACP Image Award. Publishers Weekly called his debut novel, The Water Dancer, “bold [and] dazzling,” and Esi Edugyan wrote, “Coates balances the horrors of slavery against the fantastical…. But in the end, [this is] a novel interested in the psychological effects of slavery, a grief Coates is especially adept at parsing.” He is also the writer of numerous award-winning issues of Marvel’s Black Panther (2016-2021) and Captain America (2018-2021) comics series.

Coates returns to Houston to share his new book of intertwining essays, The Message, a text he originally intended to be about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic Politics and the English Language, but Coates found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories expose and distort our realities. According to APNews.com, “The Message is set everywhere from the American South to the Middle East and Palestine and focuses on a single question: In a time of growing strife and injustice, why do stories matter?”

Kiese Laymon is a writer from Jackson, Mississippi and the author of the genre-bending novel Long Division and the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. Laymon’s bestselling Heavy: An American Memoir won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. He is the Libby Shearn Moody Professor of Creative Writing and English at Rice University.