Ta-Nehisi Coates launched a national conversation with his 2014 Atlantic cover story, ‘The Case For Reparations. In 2015, he won a National Book Award for for ‘Between the World and Me,’ written in the form of a letter to his son about the violence young black men are vulnerable to. Now, he’s written his first novel … ‘The Water Dancer’ is set in slave times and re-imagines the Underground Railroad’s leaders as having a magical power to teleport people out of slavery. The magic is activated by the power of memory.