Tayari JonesFaculty Fellow

New York Times best-selling author Tayari Jones is the author of four novels, most recently An American Marriage.

Published in 2018, An American Marriage is an Oprah’s Book Club Selection and also 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), Aspen Words Prize and an NAACP Image Award. It has been published in two dozen countries.  Her fifth novel, KIN, is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopff.

Jones, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, has also been a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, United States Artist Fellowship, NEA Fellowship, and Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship. Her third novel, Silver Sparrow, was added to the NEA Big Read Library of classics in 2016.

Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, 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 Creative Writing at Emory University.

While in residence at the Fox Center, Jones will work on OLD FOURTH WARD, a composite novel set in an East Atlanta neighborhood in flux.  Each chapter focuses on the lives lived in a single home in the district— low-rent apartments, newly constructed mega-homes, renovated Victorians, and tents under the freeway. Hyper-contemporary and deeply personal, this work acts on the belief that lives of our neighbors tell us not only where we are, but who we are.