July 2015

Coates' letter to his son about the precariousness of Black bodies in America won the National Book Award and became a cultural touchstone in the national reckoning with race following a string of police killings. It sold over two million copies and made Coates the most prominent Black public intellectual of his generation.

Coates's open letter to his teenage son about the experience of being Black in America won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Framed as a response to James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, it became one of the most widely discussed works of political nonfiction in a generation.

Serena Williams won Wimbledon 2015, completing a hold of all four Grand Slam titles simultaneously for the second time in her career. At age 33 she had won three majors that year alone, silencing doubts about her longevity and prompting comparisons to Steffi Graf's 1988 Golden Slam.