VCU’s Year of Freedom Features a Lecture from Ta-Nehisi Coates, Writer and Senior Editor for The Atlantic

By Mike Porter

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer and senior editor for The Atlantic, will speak at Virginia Commonwealth University as part of VCU’s “Year of Freedom.”

Coates’s lecture, “The Civil War and Emancipation in the Age of Obama,” will take place on Thursday, Sept. 20, 2012, beginning at 5 p.m. in the University Student Commons Theater, 907 Floyd Ave. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Coates writes about culture, politics and social issues for the magazine and its affiliated TheAtlantic.com website.

He also is the author of “The Beautiful Struggle,” a memoir about growing up in Baltimore during the age of crack and is writing his first novel about an interracial family in pre-Civil War Virginia.

Earlier this year, Coates was awarded the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

He is a former writer for the Village Voice and a contributor to Time, O and the New York Times Magazine.

The “Year of Freedom” was created with a series of programs on both VCU campuses that explore the meaning of the Civil War and Emancipation 150 years later.

For more information or questions about special accommodations, contact John Kneebone, Ph.D., chair of the Department of History in the VCU College of Humanities & Sciences, at jtkneebone@vcu.edu or (804) 828-1635.

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