Colson Whitehead (born Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead) is a renowned American novelist. He was born on November 6, 1969. Whitehead is the author of nine novels, including his 1999 debut The Intuitionist; The Underground Railroad (2016), for which he won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; and The Nickel Boys, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020, making him one of only four writers ever to win the prize twice. He has also published two books of nonfiction.

In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. He is recognized as a #1 New York Times bestselling author and has received both MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships. Whitehead lives in New York City. Notably, Harlem Shuffle is the first book in The Harlem Trilogy, with the second, Crook Manifesto, published in 2023.