Nathan McCall

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Nathan McCall (born 1955) is an American author and journalist known for writing about the African-American experience. He grew up in many places because his stepfather was in the Navy, including Morocco and Portsmouth, Virginia. After spending three years in prison, he studied journalism at Norfolk State University.

McCall worked for The Virginian-Pilot-Ledger Star and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution before joining The Washington Post in 1989. His first book, Makes Me Wanna Holler, is a memoir about his rough youth, including the violence, racial profiling, class differences, and peer pressure he faced. His second book, What’s Going On, uses personal essays to explore social, cultural, and political tensions in modern America.

After the success of his books, McCall became a sought-after speaker and left The Washington Post to tour as a lecturer. He continues to write and teaches in the African-American Studies department at Emory University in Atlanta. In 2007 he published his first novel, Them: A Novel, about gentrification in an Atlanta neighborhood and a Black man named Barlowe Reed coming to terms with change in his community.

In a 2014 Ebony interview, McCall said he was surprised that Makes Me Wanna Holler was still selling after twenty years.