The Black Experience 25'

About The Black Experience

The Black Experience 2025 (BX25) is a holistic celebration of Vermont’s Black lived experience (cultural, communal, educational), and a welcomed addition to Burlington’s observation of Black History Month.

About Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates is an award-winning author and journalist. He 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 over 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. Ta-Nehisi also enjoyed a successful run writing Marvel’s Black Panther (2016-2021) and Captain America (2018-2021) comics series. Ta-Nehisi is currently writing the screenplays for the upcoming films Wrong Answer, Superman and the film adaptation of his first fiction 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.