Nathan McCall was born in Norfolk, Va. One of five children, he graduated from Manor High School in Portsmouth and attended Norfolk State University, where he received a bachelor of arts degree in journalism in 1981. Nathan has worked as a reporter for The Virginian Pilot-Ledger Star in Norfolk, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and The Washington Post, where he worked until taking a leave of absence to write his best selling autobiography, Makes Me Wanna Holler, A Young Black Man in America.

Makes Me Wanna Holler was a New York Times bestseller and won the Blackboard Book of the Year Award for 1995. In praise of Makes Me Wanna Holler, noted scholar Henry Louis Gates wrote, "Sooner of later every generation must find its voice. It may be that ours belongs to Nathan McCall, whose memoir is...a stirring tale of transformation. He is a mesmerizing storyteller."

In 1997, McCall published his second book, What's Going On, a series of essays about politics, culture and race relations in America.

Now Nathan McCall has made his fiction debut with the 2007 publication of Them, (Atria Books), a timely and penetrating story that aims to generate the same seismic cultural impact as his nonfiction work. Them tells the story of Barlowe Reed, an African-American whose attempt to buy the rundown house he rents in an historic black neighborhood is confounded by the sudden appearance of whites abandoning the suburbs for the inner city. Over time, blacks and whites are drawn into wrenching neighborhood power struggles as they wrestle with alien world-views and the unsettling realities of gentrification.

Them was cited by Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of 2007. In 2008, the novel reached No. 1 on the Essence magazine bestseller list. Also, Them was a finalist for the 2008 Townsend Prize for Fiction, awarded to an outstanding novel or short-story collection published by a Georgia writer during the past two years. Additionally, Them was nominated for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for the 2008 Hurston/ Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction.

McCall serves as a senior lecturer in the African American Studies Department at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga. He is currently writing another novel.
 

 
NBCC TV Authors Spotlight with Nathan MaCall, with Host Curtis Bunn

 

Them: A Novel
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Paperback: 368 pages
Publisher: Washington Square Press; Reprint edition (August 19, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1416549161
ISBN-13: 978-1416549161
Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 1 inches

The author of the bestselling memoir Makes Me Wanna Holler presents a profound debut novel -- in the tradition of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities and Zadie Smith's White Teeth -- that captures the dynamics of class and race in today's urban integrated communities.

Nathan McCall's novel, Them, tells a compelling story set in a downtown Atlanta neighborhood known for its main street, Auburn Avenue, which once was regarded as the "richest Negro street in the world."

The story centers around Barlowe Reed, a single, forty-something African American who rents a ramshackle house on Randolph Street, just a stone's throw from the historic birth home of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Barlowe, who works as a printer, otherwise passes the time reading and hanging out with other men at the corner store. He shares his home and loner existence with a streetwise, twentysomething nephew who is struggling to get his troubled life back on track.

 

When Sean and Sandy Gilmore, a young white couple, move in next door, Barlowe and Sandy develop a reluctant, complex friendship as they hold probing -- often frustrating -- conversations over the backyard fence.

Members of both households, and their neighbors as well, try to go about their business, tending to their homes and jobs. However, fear and suspicion build -- and clashes ensue -- with each passing day, as more and more new whites move in and make changes and once familiar people and places disappear.

Using a blend of superbly developed characters in a story that captures the essence of this country's struggles with the unsettling realities of gentrification, McCall has produced a truly great American novel. 

 

Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America
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Paperback: 432 pages
Publisher: Vintage (January 31, 1995)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0679740708
ISBN-13: 978-0679740704
Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 1.1 inches

Examining the complexities of the problems of black youths from an insider's perspective, an African-American journalist recalls his own troubled childhood, his rehabilitation while in prison, and his successful Washington Post career.

"Not since Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land has there been such an honest and searching look at the perils of growing up a black male in urban America....A compelling depiction of the toll that racism and misguided notions of manhood have taken in the life of one black man--and, by implication, many others."--The San Francisco Chronicle -- Review

 

What's Going On
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Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: Vintage (December 29, 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0375701508
ISBN-13: 978-0375701504
Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches

Read an Excerpt

With the same personal authority and exhilarating directness he brought to his account of his passage from a prison cell to the newsroom of The Washington Post, Nathan McCall delivers a series of front-line reports on the state of the races in today's America. The resulting volume is guaranteed to shake the assumptions of readers of every pigmentation and political allegiance.

In What's Going On, McCall adds up the hidden costs of the stereotype of black athletic prowess, which tells African American teenagers that they can only succeed on the white man's terms. He introduces a fresh perspective to the debates on gangsta rap and sexual violence. He indicts the bigotry of white churches and the complacency of the black suburban middle class, celebrates the heroism of Muhammad Ali, and defends the truth-telling of Alice Walker. Engaging, provocative, and utterly fearless, here is a commentator to reckon with, addressing our most persistent divisions in a voice of stinging immediacy.

 

The Word: Black Writers Talk About the Transformative Power of Reading and Writing
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Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: Broadway (January 11, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0767929918
ISBN-13: 978-0767929912

In these thirteen strikingly candid interviews, bestselling authors, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, and writers picked the Oprah Book Club discuss how the acts of reading and writing have deeply affected their lives by expanding the conceptual borders of their communities and broadening their sense of self.

Edwidge Danticat movingly recounts the first time she encounters  black character in a book and how this changed her worldview forever; Edward P. Jones speaks openly about being raised by an illiterate mother; J. California Cooper discusses the spiritual sources of her literary inspiration; Nathan McCall explains how reading saved his life while in prison; Pearl Cleage muses eloquently about how other people's stories helped one make one's way in the world; and world renowned historian John Hope Franklin -- in the last interview he gave before his death -- touchingly recalls his childhood in the segregated South and how reading opened his mind to life's greater possibilities.

The stories that emerge from these in-depth interviews not only provide an important record of the creative life of the leading black writers but also explore the vast cultural ad spiritual benefits of reading and writing, and they support the growing initiative to encourage people to read as both a passion and a pastime.

 

Related Links

McCall's Website
www.nathanmccall.net