Acclaimed author Ta-Nehisi Coates on campus March 5

Award-wining author, blogger, and educator Ta-Nehisi Coates will present “The Case for Reparations” when he delivers the Skidmore College Speakers Bureau 2015 keynote address on Thursday, March 5. Free and open to the public, the talk will begin at 8 p.m. in Gannett Auditorium of Palamountain Hall.

A national correspondent for The Atlantic, Coates writes on a variety of cultural, political, and social issues. His Skidmore talk will likely draw on his 2014 Atlantic cover story by the same name, in which he argued for more than compensation for past injustices, advocating for “…a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.” One of the most-discussed pieces of nonfiction in recent memory, the story broke the single-day traffic record for a magazine story on The Atlantic’s web site, according to the Harriet Beecher Stow Center, which named Coates recipient of the 2015 Stowe Prize for Writing to Advance Social Justice. In announcing the award, the Stow Center cited “his writing and columns for The Atlantic, consistently and thoughtfully examining a range of cultural, social and political issues, including America’s ambivalence on race and calling for a national conversation to address the impact of long-standing racial inequities.” The Stowe prize will be presented to Coates in June.

The story also earned Coates a 2014 George Polk Award for special achievement in journalism, to be presented in April.

Coates’s critically hailed debut, The Beautiful Struggle, is a memoir of growing up in Baltimore during the age of crack. Coates is currently writing his first novel, about an interracial family in pre-Civil War Virginia.

Coates is a former writer for The Village Voice, and a contributor to Time, O, and The New York Times Magazine. In 2013 he received the National Magazine Award for opinion writing and critique and in 2012, he was awarded the Sidney Hillman Prize for opinion and analysis.

Last fall, Coates was journalist-in-residence at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He previously was the Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar at MIT and an adjunct faculty member at Columbia University.