TEJU COLE was born in the US in 1975 and raised in Nigeria. He is the author of two works of fiction: a novella, Every Day is for the Thief and a novel, Open City. He has received numerous recognitions for his work, including the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the New York City Book Award, and the Windham Campbell Prize. He is Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College, where he teaches art history and literature, and Photography Critic of the New York Times Magazine. He was a guest of the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2012, gave the Kenan Distinguished Lecture in Ethics at Duke University in 2014, and delivered the inaugural Susan D. Gubar Lecture at Indiana University in 2015. In addition to his writing for the New York Times, he has written for a broad range of publications, including the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Granta, and the Paris Review. In 2016, he will publish a collection of essays, titled Known and Strange Things, as well as a book of his photographs.


Portrait photo by Martin Lengemann.