Ta-Nehisi Coates has won the National Book Award for nonfiction for Between The World And Me.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is running late. As a national correspondent for The Atlantic and author of the new book, Between the World and Me, everyone, it seems, wants a word with the 39-year-old Baltimore native these days. His book—which Toni Morrison christened “required reading” and which the New York Times hailed a “profoundly moving account”—is a deeply personal examination of the ways in which American violence and racism have wreaked havoc on its black citizenry. “[T]he question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream,” Coates writes in the beginning portion of the book, “is the question of my life.”