JACKSON, Wyo. — Celebrated author Colson Whitehead got the rock-star treatment Monday night when he spoke at Center for the Arts for the Teton County Library’s 20th Page to Podium event.
Whitehead has twice been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, first for his 2016 novel The Underground Railroad, and then for his 2019 novel The Nickel Boys. Among his other accolades are the 2021 National Humanities Medal, the 2020 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His wide-ranging address on Monday touched on his early years writing for the Village Voice, his love for working in different genres and the evolution of his writing goals for himself.
“Until I got to college and started reading different kinds of fiction, more of the so-called classics, I wanted to write the Black Shining, or the Black Salem’s Lot — basically, if you took any Stephen King title and put ‘The Black’ in front of it, that’s what I wanted to do,” Whitehead said.
Whitehead also read from his recent New York Times essay about artificial intelligence. The audience was then treated to a sneak preview of Colson’s new novel Cool Machine, the third installment in his Harlem trilogy, due out in July.
An eavesdropper sitting outside of the auditorium might have assumed Whitehead was performing a stand-up comedy set, based on the uproarious laughter coming from the audience. In discussing his process of writing The Underground Railroad, he joked about being confronted by questions like, “Haven’t there been enough stories about slavery? Why do we need another one?”
To that, he said, “Well, I could’ve written about upper-middle class white people who feel a bit sad sometimes, but there are already a lot of people doing that.”
Throughout the evening, he demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture, making numerous references to Star Wars and even leading a brief singalong to Donna Summer’s rendition of “MacArthur Park.” During the Q&A portion, Whitehead diplomatically discussed the film and TV adaptations of his novel, and mentioned a pivotal artist’s residency spent at the University of Wyoming. After the program, Whitehead signed copies of his books in the lobby.
See Whitehead’s full address here (he appears around 50:30).
