Teju Cole Interview

Our beloved Queen Marge got a few minutes with Teju Cole when he was on campus to deliver the 2017 Martin Luther King Convocation. Teju Cole, an award-winning writer, art historian, and photographer who is currently the Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College and photography critic of the New York Times Magazine. As a public intellectual, Cole is well positioned to bring together campus conversations about urban engagement, civic engagement, global engagement, and racial justice.

Cole was born in the US in 1975 to Nigerian parents, raised in Nigeria, and currently lives in Brooklyn. He is the author of two books, a novella, Every Day is for the Thief, named a book of the year by the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, NPR, and the Telegraph, and shortlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award, and a novel, Open City, which also featured on numerous book of the year lists, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York City Book Award for Fiction, the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and the Ondaatje Prize of the Royal Society of Literature. His first book of essays, Known and Strange Things, came out in August and features his influential essay, “The White Savior Industrial Complex” among a wide variety of other essays on politics, arts, culture, history, and contemporary global experience.

Listen to the interview