Noted Experts on Race in America to Hold Public Conversation

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Ta-Nehesi Coates, an influential blogger and correspondent for The Atlantic, and Alex Kotlowitz, a writer renowned for his best-selling book about two boys growing up in a Chicago housing project, will hold a public conversation Thursday, Feb. 27, at Northwestern University.

The event takes place from 6 to 7 p.m. at the Peggy Dow Helmerich Auditorium in Annie May Swift Hall, 1920 Campus Drive, Evanston. Free and open to the public, it will be followed by a book signing from 7 to 7:30 p.m.

A former staff writer at The Village Voice and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine and to public radio’s “This American Life,” Coates is author of the memoir “The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood.” New Yorker writer Hendrik Hertzberg has called him “one of the most elegant and sharp observers of race in America.”

Kotlowitz has won similar accolades as author of “There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America” and “The Other Side of the River” and as co-producer of “The Interrupters,” a widely acclaimed film that opened at the Sundance Festival in 2011. The film was inspired by Kotlowitz’s 2008 New York Times Magazine article, “Blocking the Transmission of Violence,” published three years before.

The conversation is sponsored by Northwestern’s Center for the Writing Arts, Northwestern’s performance studies department in the School of Communication and the African American studies department in Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

For further information, email words@northwestern.edu or call (847) 467-4099.