Page to the Podium

Description

Page to the Podium, a literary speaker series, brings nationally recognized and award-winning writers to the Jackson Hole community. The series features poets, novelists, memoirists, and other great writers who contribute to the community’s cultural exchange by illuminating literature and ideas.

Page to the Podium events are community celebrations, so we host them off-site at venues that can hold greater capacity crowds (Four Seasons Ballroom and Center Theater), giving a wide-swath of the community the opportunity to experience a special event of literary entertainment together - for free!

April 25, 2023: Ta-Nehisi Coates (7pm), Center for the Arts in Jackson

Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of the bestselling books The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, The Water Dancer, and Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award in 2015. He was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship that same year.

As a journalist with a career spanning more than two decades, he’s written for numerous publications including The Washington City Paper, The Village Voice, The New Yorker and The New York Times. During his time reporting for The Atlantic between 2008-2018, he penned numerous articles and essays, including the National Magazine Award-winning 2012 essay Fear of a Black President and the influential June 2014 essay The Case For Reparations.

Coates also enjoyed a successful run writing Marvel’s Black Panther (2016-2021) and Captain America (2018-2021) comics series. He is currently writing the screenplays for the upcoming films Wrong Answer, Superman and the film adaptation of his first novel, The Water Dancer. In the fall of 2022, he joined Howard University’s faculty as a writer-in-residence and the Sterling Brown Chair in the Department of English.

His presentation includes a reading, an onstage conversation with Wyoming author Nina McConigley, and and a question and answer session with the audience. A book signing in the lobby follows the presentation, and books will be for sale onsite by Jackson Hole Book Trader.

The library has created a book club kit for Coates’ Between the World and Me with 15 copies of the books and discussion questions.

Past Speakers

The series kicked off in November 2006, with Frank McCourt, and has gone on to present renowned authors who are pillars in their field.

In recent years, Page to the Podium has also presented authors who’ve catapulted to the national stage through outstanding bestsellers and/or the most prestigious national prizes. These authors are next generation “pillars.”

Details