FEATURE Story by Dr. Wanda Ross Padilla
– SANTA FE NEWS
“COLSON WHITEHEAD in Santa Fe!”
UNDERGROUND RAILROAD author Colson Whitehead spoke to a packed
audience at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, NM on Wednesday, May 9,
2018. Colson’s book Underground Railroad, is the winner of the 2017
Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Carnegie Metal for
Fiction. The book chronicles the life of Cora, a slave on a cotton
plantation in Georgia, and her quest for freedom through the
Underground Railroad, no longer a metaphor but re imagined as an actual
set of tracts, tunnels, and conductors lying just beneath the southern
soil.
His reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in publications such as The
New York Times, The New Yorkers, and Harper’s. A recipient of a Whiting
Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he has
taught at several universities, including Wesleyan, Princeton and
Columbia.