Colson Whitehead is a prize-winning African American author. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Award for The Underground Railroad (2016) and received a second Pulitzer for The Nickel Boys (2020). Although now known primarily as a novelist, after graduating from Harvard, Whitehead wrote for New York City paper The Village Voice. It was during his time covering local events that he began working on the book-length pieces that would become his first novels. Born and raised in New York City, Whitehead sets much of his work in and around Manhattan, and Crook Manifesto in particular represents his interest in the way that the city’s history has impacted its African American residents.

Whitehead’s work depicts the experiences of African Americans during the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, and his novels engage with such themes as slavery, reconstruction, racism, discrimination, institutional and systemic oppression, and representations of African Americans in popular culture. Though he is one of America’s most lauded contemporary producers of literary fiction, Whitehead’s diverse, versatile body of work draws from the conventions of genre fiction. The Intuitionist (1999) and Zone One (2011) are examples of Whitehead’s speculative fiction works, and Harlem Shuffle (2021) and Crook Manifesto (2023) represent his first forays into crime writing.