Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead was raised in Manhattan, where he attended Trinity School. After graduating from Harvard University in 1991, Whitehead wrote reviews for The Village Voice. He has written 11 book-length works, nine of which are novels. Whitehead’s first novel, The Intuitionist (1999), is a work of speculative fiction featuring elevator inspectors and racial allegory. His work has received many honors; most notably, his novel The Underground Railroad (2016)—an alternative history set in the Antebellum South—won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal for Fiction, and the National Book Award. His next novel, The Nickel Boys (2019)—based on the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida—won Whitehead a second Pulitzer Prize, as well as the Kirkus Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. Additionally, Whitehead acted as executive producer on a film adaptation of The Nickel Boys, which was released in 2024. His most recent novel, Crook Manifesto (2023), is a follow-up to 2021’s Harlem Shuffle, following furniture salesman Ray Carney. Whitehead’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper’s, and Granta. He has received both a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he has taught at Princeton University, Columbia University, Wesleyan University, New York University, and the University of Houston, among others. Whitehead lives in Manhattan with his family.