A Night with Ta-Nehisi Coates

Join us for an unforgettable night of conversation, insight, and reflection as we welcome acclaimed author Ta-Nehisi Coates in conversation with Marguerite Casey Foundation (MCF) president and CEO Dr. Carmen Rojas on stage at the Symphony Space in NYC.

This special book club event, presented by MCF and Haymarket Books, will delve into Coates’s latest work, The Message, a profound exploration of storytelling, justice, and the power of the written word as a tool to bear witness to injustice.

In The Message, Coates masterfully weaves together personal narratives, historical reflections, and urgent political commentary, addressing his students—and all of us—with a call to action: to do our part to “save the world.”

From his travels through Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine, Coates outlines the value of forging global solidarities as we reimagine a world rooted in dignity and justice. His essays are a testament to the enduring power of storytelling and the importance of challenging efforts to censor anticolonial histories and struggles.

About the MCF Book Club: Reading for a Liberated Future

Marguerite Casey Foundation is working toward a country where our government prioritizes the needs of excluded and underrepresented people. To achieve that vision, we support organizations, scholars, leaders, and initiatives focused on shifting the balance of power in society—building power for communities who continue to be excluded from shaping how society works and from sharing in its rewards and freedoms.

The MCF Book Club shares the ideas of leaders who encourage us to imagine how we can radically transform our democracy, economy, and society. Throughout the series, authors, scholars, and organizers examine the most pressing issues of our time. Together, they offer a course toward a liberated future. In an effort to get these powerful titles into as many hands as possible, the foundation is proud to support visionary authors by purchasing and sharing hundreds of free copies of each publication featured in the MCF Book Club. The copies we purchase are donated to a mix of registered guests and community-based organizations. MCF Book Club events are free, open to the public, and available for your virtual viewing pleasure. For information, visit
CaseyGrants.org/BookClub.

Praise for The Message
“[Coates] is intellectually fearless . . . unshackled by political or racial ideology, humane in his judgments, respectful of facts, acutely aware of the difference between what is knowable and what is not.”—New Yorker
“An earnest and intimate exploration of locations of extreme injustice, and of the power of writing to render a more compassionate—and more honest—future . . . At once a rallying cry and a love letter to writing itself, the book is an urgent reminder that ‘politics is the art of the possible, but art
creates the possible of politics.’”—Oprah Daily
“Ever since his Baldwin-inflected Between the World and Me, Coates has been known for his incisive (and sometimes uncomfortable) cultural and political commentary. Here he journeys from West Africa to the American South to Palestine to examine how the stories we tell can fail us, and to argue that only the truth can bring justice.”—Boston Globe

Dr. Carmen Rojas
President and CEO, Marguerite Casey Foundation
Dr. Carmen Rojas is the president and CEO of Marguerite Casey Foundation. Under her leadership, the foundation launched the prestigious Freedom Scholar award, and since starting in 2020, has granted more than $170M in funding to dozens of organizations doing the hard work of shifting power to those people who have long been excluded from having it. Prior to MCF, Dr. Rojas was the cofounder and CEO of the Workers Lab, an innovation lab that partners with workers to develop new ideas that help them succeed and flourish.

Ta-Nehisi Coates
Author and Journalist
Ta-Nehisi Coates is an award-winning author and journalist. He is the author of the bestselling books The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, The Water Dancer, and Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award in 2015. He was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship that same year. As a journalist with a career spanning over two decades, he’s written for numerous publications, including the Washington City Paper, Village Voice, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. During his time reporting for the Atlantic from 2008 to 2018, he penned numerous articles and essays, including the National Magazine Award–winning 2012 essay “Fear of a Black President” and the influential June 2014 essay “The Case for Reparations.” Ta-Nehisi also enjoyed a successful run writing Marvel’s Black Panther (2016–2021) and Captain America (2018–2021) comics series. Ta-Nehisi is currently writing the screenplays for the upcoming films Wrong Answer and Superman and the film adaptation of his first novel, The Water Dancer. In the fall of 2022, he joined Howard University’s faculty as a writer-in-residence and the Sterling Brown Chair in the Department of English.