Tayari Jones is an award-winning novelist and essayist whose work explores family, identity, love and justice in the American South. Jones is an Atlanta native and is the author of Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, Silver Sparrow, An American Marriage, and the No. 1 New York Times bestselling novel Kin.
Her novel An American Marriage was an Oprah's Book Club selection, a New York Times bestseller, winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction, the Aspen Words Literary Prize and an NAACP Image Award. Her most recent novel, Kin, became her second Oprah's Book Club selection.
Jones was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2026 and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and many more. She is praised by Essence magazine as "one of the most important voices of her generation." Jones is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University and an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.