Fiction-Winning Colson Whitehead To Speak on 'The Underground Railroad'

2017 Fiction winner Colson Whitehead will speak at the University of Arizona's College of Humanities as a part of the university's Tuscon Humanities Festival. Whitehead will focus on his prize-winning novel, The Underground Railroad. 

Whitehead's novel won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The novel, taking place in pre-Civil War America, reimagines the underground railroad as an actual physical train system and the journey of two slaves in navigating it. Whitehead's other novels include The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, and his upcoming novel The Nickel Boys (set to be published in 2019). 

Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times wrote of The Underground Railroad, "One of the remarkable things about this novel is how Mr. Whitehead found an elastic voice that accommodates both brute realism and fablelike allegory, the plain-spoken and the poetic — a voice that enables him to convey the historical horrors of slavery with raw, shocking power."

For more information about the event and to register, click here.