Tayari Jones
Postgraduate Writers' Conference Faculty
Profile
Tayari Jones is the New York Times best-selling author of four novels: Leaving Atlanta (2002), The Untelling (2005), Silver Sparrow (2011), and most recently, An American Marriage. Published in 2018, An American Marriage was an Oprah’s Book Club Selection and appeared on Barack Obama’s summer reading list as well as his year-end roundup. The novel was awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Orange Prize), the Aspen Words Literary Prize and an NAACP Image Award. It has been published in two dozen countries. Silver Sparrow was named a #1 Indie Next Pick by booksellers in 2011, and the NEA added it to its Big Read Library of classics in 2016.
A member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, Jones 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, Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship, and a 2021 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Fiction. A graduate of Spelman College, the University of Iowa, and Arizona State University, she is an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University.