Author Colson Whitehead will visit UGA and Athens for the Ferdinand Phinizy Lecture, which will be included in the university's Spotlight on the Arts festival and in the UGA Signature Lecture Series. The event is free and open to the public, with no advance registration required. In addition to his public talk in the UGA Chapel, Whitehead will visit with students at UGA and at Cedar Shoals High School in Athens.

Whitehead is the number-one New York Times bestselling author of 11 books of fiction and nonfiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning novels The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys. His reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York magazine, Harper's, Granta, and many other publications. He has received the National Humanities Medal, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Award, the Carnegie Medal for Fiction, and numerous other honors. Whitehead's latest novel is Crook Manifesto, the second in his Harlem Trilogy. It was published in July 2023.

The Ferdinand Phinizy Lectureship is endowed through the University of Georgia Foundation, administered by the department of history, and presented in partnership with the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and the University of Georgia Press.