Wednesday night, author Ta-Nehisi Coates won the National Book Award for nonfiction for Between the World and Me, his unflinching look at the black male body in America. It caps off what has already been a tremendous year for Coates, who also won a MacArthur Genius Grant in September. In his acceptance speech, Coates touches on the difficulty of bringing the book to fruition. “It was, in fact, an odyssey,†said Coates. “There was only one thing we really had at the core of it: the death, the murder, the killing of my friend Prince Carmen Jones.†And so he dedicated his award to that friend. May he rest in peace.
