Best-Selling Author Nathan McCall

Nathan McCall, author of Them.

Staff reports

Best-selling author Nathan McCall will speak in Asheville at 7 p.m. Friday, April 23 at the YMI Cultural Center. He’s the author of Makes Me Wanna Holler and Them, about gentrification in the Old Fourth Ward community in Atlanta.

McCall studied journalism at Norfolk State University and reported for the Virginian Pilot-Ledger Star and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution before moving to The Washington Post in 1989. He has dedicated his career to improving race relations in the United States.

In his first book, Makes Me Wanna Holler, McCall provides a detailed
story of his life and the hardships he experienced growing up with
racial profiling, class differences, and peer pressure. His second book,
What’s Going On, used personal essays to discuss such larger issues as
social, cultural, and political tensions that affect the modern day
United States. Today he continues to write and holds the post of
lecturer in the Department of African American Studies at Emory
University in Atlanta, Georgia.

McCall’s novel Them deals with the issues of gentrification in an
Atlanta neighborhood. Them tells the story of Barlowe Reed, a single,
forty-something African American man, who has to come to terms with the
gentrification of his neighborhood, and in particular the influx of
white people to the area.