Skip to main content

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of the memoir Losing My Cool: Love, Literature and a Black Man’s Escape from the Crowd (Penguin Press, 2010). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic. He currently lives in Paris, where he is an associate editor at Purple Fashion Magazine and a regular book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. He is at work on a screenplay and a novel.

Author

Byron Kim, Synecdoche, 1991. Oil and wax on luan, birch plywood, and plywood, 120 1/4’’ x 350 1/4’’ (© Byron Kim. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art/Richard S. Zeisler Fund)

Black and Blue and Blond

Winter 2015 | Essays

In 1517, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, feeling great pity for the Indians who grew worn and lean in the drudging infernos of the Antillean gold mines, proposed to Emperor Charles V that Negroes be brought to the isles of the Caribbean, so that they m [...]