Tayari Jones

Tayari Jones was born in 1970 in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Atlanta's historically Black Southwest neighbourhoods, which form the backdrop for much of her fiction. She earned a BA from Spelman College, an MA from the University of Iowa, and an MFA from Arizona State University. She is a professor of creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta. Jones's novels include Leaving Atlanta (2002), The Untelling (2005), Silver Sparrow (2011), and An American Marriage (2018). An American Marriage, which explores race, incarceration, and the testing of marriage when a Black man is wrongly convicted of a crime he did not commit, won the Women's Prize for Fiction 2019, received an enthusiastic endorsement from Oprah Winfrey, and became a major bestseller. Jones is widely regarded as one of the most important chroniclers of Black American life in contemporary literature.