Ta-Nehisi Coates

The eminent author of Between the World and Me and We Were Eight Years In Power and "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration" is not such a great novelist, according to Charles Mudede. Mudede writes: "The main flaw with the novel The Water Dancer is Coates wrote it to sound and feel like a novel. The story—which is set in Virginia, and is narrated by a young man, Hiram Walker, who has a photographic memory (one of the two superpowers he possesses)—is told with the deliberate gravity of a writer who believes he's writing a major work of fiction." Despite this apparent misstep, you should still see Coates, because he's a brilliant essayist and an important voice for addressing the deep wounds and injustices afflicting the African American community.