COLSEN WHITEHEAD – Sag Harbor

Fifteen year old Benji Cooper, one of the only black students at an elite prep school in Manhattan, spends every summer at a small, African American beachfront community in the Hamptons with his younger brother. Their parents join for the weekends. “Sag Harbor,” Colson Whitehead’s self-described autobiographical fourth novel, set in 1985, is an inner monologue of stories about a teenage summer where New Coke is introduced and kids were allowed to run wild. Our guest, former MacArthur fellow COLSEN WHITEHEAD has written three other novels: “The Intuitionist,” “John Henry Days,” and “Apex Hides the Hurt.” His collection of New York City essays is “Colossus of New York.” A former TV, book and music reviewer at the Village Voice, Colson’s writing has been featured in the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine and Harper’s. Listen to the mp3