Jelani Cobb is a historian, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, and has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015. He writes frequently about race, politics, history, and culture. He is the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress, The Devil and Dave Chappelle: And Other Essays, To The Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic, and he is the co-editor of a new anthology, The Matter of Black Lives. This new book compiles New Yorker essays on race in America through time, by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hilton Als, Zadie Smith, and more—with a foreword by Cobb. The anthology provides a bold and complex portrait of Black life in America, told through stories of private triumphs and national tragedies, political vision and artistic inspiration.
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