Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet
Ta-Nehisi Coates was born in Baltimore, the son of William Paul Coates, a former Black Panther and founder of Black Classic Press. Coates attended Howard University in Washington DC, before leaving to become a journalist. He wrote for several publications including The Village Voice and Time, but it was his essays on racism and the African American experience for The Atlantic that won him global attention and critical acclaim. He has published several works of non-fiction, including a memoir, The Beautiful Struggle (2008), and Between the World and Me (2015), for which he won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. He has written several Marvel Comics including Black Panther and Captain America. His first novel, The Water Dancer, was published in 2019 and he received a MacArthur Fellowship in the same year.
Walter Mosley was born in Los Angeles to a Jewish mother and African American father. He earned a degree in political science at Johnson State College in Vermont before moving to New York. While working as a computer programmer for Mobil Oil, Mosley became inspired by Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. He enrolled in a writing course at the City College of New York where he was tutored by Irish novelist and playwright Edna O’Brien. He published his first novel in 1990, Devil in a Blue Dress, a hardboiled noir featuring African American private investigator ‘Easy’ Rawlins. Mosley went on to publish over 60 books ranging from non-fiction to science fiction, each offering a unique racial perspective on both genre and American history. Mosley has also written for television and theatre and has won over a dozen awards. In 2013 he was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. A lifelong comic book fan, Mosley has over 30,000 in his collection.