2019 TIAA Lecture Series: Tayari Jones
Tayari Jones is the author of four novels, including An American Marriage, which was named a 2018 Oprah’s Book Club Selection. Jones was born and raised in Atlanta, and much of her writing centers on the urban South. According to Oprah Winfrey, “It’s among Tayari’s many gifts that she can touch us soul to soul with her words.”
A member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, she has also been a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, United States Artist Fellowship, NEA Fellowship, and Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship.
Jones’s An American Marriage is a New York Times (#2), Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller with 250,000 copies in print, all within two weeks of its release. This story of a marriage torn apart by a wrongful conviction has been called “haunting” and “beautifully written” by The New York Times Book Review. The book was recently nominated for the 2019 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Fiction.
Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She spent the 2011–2012 academic year as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard where she studied the collateral damage of mass incarceration in the United States. She is currently a professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.