Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic and writes an immensely popular blog which was included on TIME Magazine‘s list of Best Blogs of 2011, with the motivation, “Like many of the world’s best bloggers Atlantic senior editor Ta-Nehisi Coates is impossible to pigeonhole.” Coates’ prose is electric, crackling with wit and intelligence. He tackles some of the most infected issues of our time – race, social inequality, masculinity – with a rare balance of passion and equanimity.
Coates grew up in a rough section of West Baltimore. His father was a former Black Panther and founded the publishing company Black Classic Press, which he ran out of their home. Coats’ 2008 memoir The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, is a lyric depiction of coming of age as an African American man in America.
Coates attended Howard University but dropped out to pursue journalism. He wrote for The Village Voice, Washington City Paper, and TIME Magazine before joining The Atlantic.
On May 2, 2013, he won a National Magazine Award for his article entitled “Fear of a Black President.”
When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Tony Dorsett, the running back for the Dallas Cowboys. That’s what I wanted to be.
Did you play a lot of football on your own or was that just sort of a….?
I did, but I didn’t play too much on account of not being very good. You know, it was just something we did in the neighborhood, threw the football and ran around a lot, yeah, a lot of fun.
And were you a kid who told a lot of stories?
No, but, you know, I did ask a lot of questions. I asked a lot of questions. I really annoyed my brothers and sisters, I remember that.
You were the kid who was always saying, “Why? Why?”
Yes, that was me.
What was it you wanted to know?
Everything! I mean that was how I ultimately got into writing. Professionally I started off in journalism and the thing about journalism is, it’s a license to ask anybody anything. For a kid like me that was exciting, you know?
My dad read a lot, I do know that. My mom read a lot, there were books all over the house.
Your father actually ran a publishing company, right?
He did, he ran a small publishing company so there were books everywhere.
I was voracious, man. My natural inclination was to read.
Was there an early reading experience that was important to you?
Yeah, Choose Your Own Adventure. I was just like, “Wow, you get to sit in the driver’s seat.”
A lot of writers talk about that moment when they’re reading and they realize that someone actually wrote the story, that there’s someone behind the story.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think what you’re describing similar, right? That feeling that you wanted to control the narrative.
Yeah it was totally similar. It’s the idea that, “Hey you can’t do it.” You know what I mean? Choose Your Own Adventure says, “Yes, you can control the story.” It’s not even wondering, “Can I?” The answer is, “Yes, you can.” It’s actually not that much of a leap from saying, “I can control the story” to “I can actually write the story.”
Continue reading
Hoyte van Hoytema is a one of the world’s most sought-after cinematographers. He was born in Switzerland, raised in the Netherlands, educated in Poland, has won awards in Scandinavia and is now the hottest ticket in Hollywood. His film credits include Let The Right One In, for which he received the Nordic Vision Award for cinematography; The Fighter; Call Girl; and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which garnered him a BAFTA and an ASC nomination. He is famous for his ability to capture the intangible; to paint emotion as well as color with his lens.
Benjamin Anastas is a writer whose work reminds us all to keep it real. He published two novels, An Underachiever’s Diary (1998), recently re-released in paperback by the Dial Press, and The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor’s Disappearance: A Novel (2001), which was a New York Times Notable Book, before writing the shimmeringly beautiful and gut-wrenchingly painful memoir Too Good To Be True (2012), in which he tells the story of a life (his own) whirling out of control. When his third novel is refused, his wife leaves him, and he becomes so utterly broke that he must scavenge change to buy food for his toddler son, the once-promising writer must find a way to put the pieces of his existence back together. In a review in The New York Times Book Review, Deb Olin Unferth writes, “New Yorkers connected to publishing will have fun finding themselves in this book — or they might recoil in horror. (…) With painful precision he tells a midlife coming-of-age story: the world shatters us.” 
Nathan Englander is a critically acclaimed writer who has been translated into over a dozen languages and was named one of “20 Writers for the 21st Century” by The New Yorker. He is the author of one novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, and two short story collections, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, which won the 2012 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He translated New American Haggadah, which was edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, and co-translated Etger Keret’s Suddenly A knock at the Door, both published in 2012. His stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Washington Post as well as in The O. Henry Prize Stories and several editions of The Best American Short Stories. In 2012, his play, The Twenty-Seventh Man, premiered at The Public Theater in New York City. 
Nick Harkaway is a British writer who has two novels and one book of non-fiction under his belt. The Guardian referred to his debut novel, The Gone-Away World, as “a beautifully silly plan of melding a kung-fu epic with an Iraq-war satire and a Mad Max adventure.” Oh, and it’s set in a scary post-Apocalyptic world. Angelmaker was published in the United States in 2012 and received ridiculously gleeful reviews. In fact, Harkaway’s writing tends to inspire gleeful responses, slithering impishly as it does over genre boundaries and giving a good-natured swat at reader expectations. 
Idra Novey is a poet and translator whose exuberance is as apparent on the page as it is in person. She has published two poetry collections, The Next Country, which was a finalist for the Foreward Book of the Year Award in poetry and Exit, Civilian, which was selected by Patricia Smith for the 2011 National Poetry Series. Her most recent translation is Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H., which was published by New Directions in 2012. Her work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, Slate, American Poetry Review, and NPR’s All Things Considered, among other places. 
Sarah Manguso has written two books of poetry, Siste Viator and The Captain Lands in Paradise; one short story collection, Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape; and two memoirs, The Two Kinds of Decay and The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend. The Guardians, which is a beautiful and unusual chronicle of losing a friend to suicide, was named one of the top ten books of the year by Salon while the Telegraph dubbed it a Best Book of the Year.
Sonya Chung is a novelist, essayist, teacher, and editor whose writing process could easily prove that slow and steady wins the race. She is the author of the novel Long for This World, which was published by Scribner in 2010. Her stories, reviews, and essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Crab Orchard Review, Tin House, Sonora Review, FiveChapters, BOMB Magazine, and the anthology The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, among others. 
Renee Robinson is a legendary American dancer who, on December 9th, 2012 at City Center in New York City, danced her last dance as the iconic woman with the umbrella in “Revelations,” one of the most popular and recognizable dances in modern history. Robinson has retired after over thirty years with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, her tenure being the longest of any female dancer in the history of the company. She was the last dancer in the company to have been chosen by Alvin Ailey himself. 
We did it. We survived 2012, with its apocalyptic predictions and tragic realities. 2013 is either a magical year or a jinxed year, depending on your inclinations for superstition. Or else it’s just a year, like any other. But particulars of definition or superstition aside, a year is a collection of weeks and months. And since we strive to publish a new interview every Monday, a DoY year is a collection of many, many interviews. Some measure their life in coffee spoons, we measure our existence in conversations.
