Tanner Colby
Author of Some of My Best Friends Are Black
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Author of Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture
Photo credit: Luke Abiol
The first of his generation to measure the seductive power of hip-hop against its restrictive worldview, Georgetown and New York University graduate Thomas Chatterton Williams recounts how his love of books—and bond with his father—became his salvation. The author of Losing My Cool speaks with insight about popular culture, education, and inequality.
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About Thomas Chatterton Williams
Thomas Chatterton Williams has written for the New York Times, Harper’s, the London Review of Books, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, Le Monde and many other publications. He lives in Paris, where he is an associate editor at Holiday magazine. His next book, a reckoning with how we define race in America, will expand his essay “Black and Blue and Blond,” published in Virginia Quarterly Review and anthologized in The Best American Essays 2016.
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Speaking Topics
Losing My Cool
College and the Discovery Years: Self-definition vs. the Pressure to Conform
Constructing Modern Identity Beyond Race
African-Americans in Paris
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Video
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Books by Thomas Chatterton Williams
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Media About Thomas Chatterton Williams
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Featured Title
Losing My Cool
"This is more than a coming-of-age story; it is an awakening, as Williams blends Dostoyevsky and Jay-Z in a compelling memoir and analysis of urban youth culture."—Booklist (starred review)
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