“It’s among Tayari’s many gifts that she can touch us soul to soul with her words.”
— OPRAH WINFREY
“Tayari Jones is blessed with vision to see through to the surprising and devastating truths at the heart of ordinary lives, strength to wrest those truths free, and a gift of language to lay it all out, compelling and clear. That has been true from her very first book, but with An American Marriage that vision, that strength and that truth-telling voice have found a new level of artistry and power.”
—MICHAEL CHABON, author of Moonglow: A Novel
“I love An American Marriage and I’m so excited for this book to be in the world. Tayari’s novel is timely, thoughtful, and beautifully written. Reading it, I found myself angry as hell, laughing out loud, choking up and cheering. A gem of a book.”
—JACQUELINE WOODSON, author of Brown Girl Dreaming
“Tayari Jones is a great storyteller. An American Marriage holds the reader from first page to last, with her compassionate observation, her clear-eyed insight and her beautifully written and complex characters. Jones understands love and loss and writes with passion and precision about the forces that move us all from one to another.”
—AMY BLOOM, bestselling author of Lucky Us
“An American Marriage asks hard questions about injustice and betrayal, and answers them with a heartbreaking and genuinely suspenseful love story in which nobody’s wrong and everybody’s wounded. Tayari Jones has written a complex and important novel about people trapped in a tragic situation, struggling to reconcile their responsibilities and desires.”
—TOM PERROTTA, author of The Leftovers
“Tayari Jones’ American Marriage is a stunning epic love story filled with breathtaking twists and turns, while bursting with realized and unrealized dreams. Skillfully crafted and beautifully written, American Marriage is an exquisite, timely, and powerful novel that feels both urgent and indispensable.”
—EDWIDGE DANTICAT, author of Breath, Eyes, Memory
An American Marriage has been selected for the 2018 National Book Award Longlist for Fiction,. The longlist will be whittled down to a shortlist of five books, which will be announced Oct. 10. The winner will be revealed at a ceremony in New York on Nov. 14.
For the complete 2018 National Book Awards Longlist for Fiction, click here.
Literacy Partners provides excerpts of over two hundred books, poems, and short stories to New Yorkers on and off the subway. For an excerpt of An American Marriage, click here.
An American Marriage has been chosen for President Barack Obama’s 2018 Summer Reading List. In a Facebook post, the President wrote: “One of my favorite parts of summer is deciding what to read when things slow down just a bit, whether it’s on a vacation with family or just a quiet afternoon. This summer I’ve been absorbed by new novels, revisited an old classic, and reaffirmed my faith in our ability to move forward together when we seek the truth….An American Marriage by Tayari Jones is a moving portrayal of the effects of a wrongful conviction on a young African-American couple.”
Tayari Jones is honored to have An American Marriage on President Obama’s 2018 Summer Reading List– see President Obama’s complete list of summer reading recommendations here.
Tayari Jones will join Emory University’s renowned Creative Writing Program this fall as a member of the English faculty in Emory College of Arts and Sciences. She will be on sabbatical for the fall semester, but will begin teaching in January 2019.
“An American Marriage Came Together After A Trip To The Mall”
Find the full transcript here.
Oprah Winfrey chooses An American Marriage for 2018 Oprah’s Book Club.
Five authors comprise the 2018 class of Georgia Writers Hall of Fame inductees: Michael Bishop, Tayari Jones and Cynthia Shearer will be admitted at the November ceremony; Furman Bisher and Frances Newman will be honored posthumously.Tayari Jones has assumed exciting new roles in two arts organizations.
Teachers & Writers Collaborative (T&W) seeks to educate the imagination by offering innovative creative writing programs for students and teachers, and by providing a variety of publications and resources to support learning through the literary arts. T&W programs include writing workshops for students, professional development for educators, managing the New York Poetry Out Loud competition, and publishing Teachers & Writers Magazine and other resources about the teaching of creative writing.
The Center for Southern Literary Arts cultivates the rich and diverse stories of the Memphis region and encourages and supports innovations in the literary arts. Through community programs, education initiatives, artist residencies, and creative economic development, the CSLA expands beyond the traditional boundaries of the literary arts to capture and reclaim stories as a pathway to repair, equity, and justice in the city, the South, and the nation.
The Diana L. Bennett Fellows Program at UNLV’s Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute (BMI) awards Tayari Jones a fellowship for the academic year 2017-18. She will be in residence in Las Vegas to accept this opportunity and begin work on her fifth novel. Each year, BMI offers the Bennett Fellowship to three critically acclaimed writers who, for one or two semesters, contribute to the cultural landscape of UNLV and the larger Las Vegas community. Jones is the 2017-18 Shearing Fellow. More.
The cover of Tayari Jones’s new novel, An American Marriage, is revealed today on Entertainment Weekly. Read an excerpt.
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A Capella Books (Atlanta)
“People who don’t know Atlanta don’t understand the codes and contradictions of the New South. Yes, Margaret Mitchell imagined the plantation Tara within the city limits, but it’s also the home of OutKast. Atlanta has captured the imagination of trash TV with Todd Chrisley’s magnolia-cream accent but also the decidedly urban antics of Love & Hip Hop. The ashes of the Civil War still hang in the air, but immigration is turning the South into the Global South.
With Atlanta Noir, my hope was to find the writers who could show the city in all of its dizzy complexity. These fourteen writers represent the city’s many neighborhoods and demographics—from the Southern punk scene of Little Five Points to the Junior League world of Peachtree City, where things are not always as they seem. There is more going on at the local Waffle House than just scattering, smothering, and chunking. This is a major international city but it’s still the Bible Belt. A megapreacher’s past catches up with him, and gentrification cannot tame the outlaw spirit of the city too busy to hate. Our airport boasts that it is the busiest in the world; locals declare that even on the way to heaven, you have to change planes at Hartsfield-Jackson. Let us think of Atlanta Noir as an after-hours welcome to the city where we serve our sweet tea with a shot of bourbon.”
The following organizations received grants from the NEA Big Read to plan programming around Silver Sparrow. Dates and times will be posted on this “Appearances” page.
Black Storytellers of San Diego, Chula Vista, California
Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn, New York
Chatanooga State Community College, Chattanooga, Tennessee
Essex County Library Directors, Newark, New Jersey
Jefferson Madison Regional Library, Charlotesville, Virginia
Peoria Public Library, Peoria, Illinoiis
Troy University Rosa Parks Library, Montgomery, Alabama
“A writer of great imagination, Irving can sell the reader on nearly any plot twist no matter how incredible — from a murderous statue of the Virgin Mary to a pride of anthropomorphized lionesses to a pair of (possibly) paranormal, (definitely) kinky bibliophiles. Under his spell, all of this seems perfectly and irresistibly plausible.” — Tayari Jones on Avenue of Mysteries by John Irving.