Career Highlights

• Colson Whitehead received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002 (nicknamed the "Genius Award")
• Whitehead is best-known as the author of John Henry Days, which won the Young Lions Fiction Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize
• Sag Harbor is a novel about teenagers hanging out in Sag Harbor, Long Island during the summer of 1985
• Whitehead's writing has have appeared in publications like the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and Harper’s

Career Overview

Colson Whitehead is a New York-based novelist. He graduated from Harvard College in 1991 and began writing for The Village Voice where he reviewed TV shows, books and music. He began drafting his first novels while working at the Voice, and published The Intuitionist in 1999 about intrigue in the Department of Elevator Inspectors. The book was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and a winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award. Esquire Magazine named The Intuitionist the best first novel of the year, and GQ called it one of the "novels of the millennium."

Whitehead has written three more award-winning works. His latest, Sag Harbor, is a novel about teenagers hanging out in Sag Harbor, Long Island, during the summer of 1985. Whitehead calls it his “autobiographical fourth novel.” He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Author Colson Whitehead joined ThinkTalk host Erika Thomas to discuss his transition from a show, book and music reviewer to a novelist. Whitehead offers career advice and motivation for students, while touching upon the writing process of his fictional novel Sag Harbor.