Colson Whitehead is an American novelist and essayist. He is best known for his novels The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Sag Harbor, The Underground Railroad, and The Nickel Boys, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2020. Whitehead has also written for television and film, and his essays and non-fiction works have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Harper's Magazine. He has won numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the National Book Award. Whitehead is a professor at Columbia University and lives in New York City. He is a celebrated author whose work has been praised for its insight into race, identity, and history.