Tayari Jones, C'91, is the author of "The Untelling," which won the Lillian C. Smith Award and was featured at Target as a "Breakout Book."
Her first book, "Leaving Atlanta," a coming of age story set during the city’s infamous child murders of 1979-81, received many awards and accolades including the Hurston/Wright Award for Debut Fiction. It was named “Novel of the Year” by Atlanta Magazine and “Best Southern Novel of the Year,” by Creative Loafing Atlanta. The Atlanta Journal Constitution and The Washington Post both listed it as one of the best of 2002. The novel has also been featured as a campus-wide reading selection at Berry College and Georgia College and State University.
"Silver Sparrow," her third novel has just been published by Algonquin Books. Upon it’s publication, the Village Voice wrote that “Tayari Jones is fast defining black midle class Atlanta the way that Cheever did for Westchester.” The American Booksellers chose Silver Sparrow and the #1 Indie Next pick for June 2011. To promote the title, Jones will embark upon a national tour with over forty appearances. National media coverage includes O Magazine, Vogue, Poets and Writers, NPR’s All Things Considered, among other venues.
Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, The University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She has taught at Prairie View A&M University, East Tennessee State University, The University of Illinois and George Washington University. Currently, she is an Associate Professor in the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark University.
She was named as the 2008 Collins Fellow by the United States Artists Foundation. She will spend the 2011-12 academic year at Harvard University as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow, researching her fourth novel.
Jones has spoken to women writers of the FEMWRITE conference in Uganda via teleconference at the invitation of the U.S. Department of State, and took a trip to Africa, also initiated by the U.S. Department of State, as part of a cultural and literary exchange in Ghana.
She maintains a popular blog at
www.tayarijones.com/blog.
Posted By: Marta Fernandez
Tuesday, August 2nd 2011 at 12:27PM
You can also
click
here to view all posts by this author...
