An A.D. White Professors-at-Large keynote public event

Tayari Jones (Emory University; A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell) will present the public talk, “What We Answer To: A Southern Daughter’s REFLECTION,” on Thursday, March 21, at 5pm, in the Multipurpose Room, Africana Studies and Research Center. A reception in the lobby will follow. Copies of Jones’ signed books will be made available for sale at the event.

This event is part of an A.D. White Professors-at-Large (ADW-PAL) visit and is cosponsored by the Dept. of Literatures in English and Africana Studies and Research Center.

Jones is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University. She is the best-selling author of An American Marriage, which won the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction and was named a 2018 Oprah’s Book Club Selection. Jones’ other novels include Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, and Silver Sparrow.

Named one of TIME’s “10 Best Fiction Books of 2018,” An American Marriage “illuminates the waves of injustice and heartbreak that unravel families entangled in a flawed judicial system.” The New York Times describes An American Marriage as “beautifully written” and “wise and compassionate.” The novel has been compared to James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk.

Also highly acclaimed, Jones’ novel Silver Sparrow received a #1 Indie Next Pick by booksellers in 2011 and the National Endowment for the Arts added it to its Big Read Library of classics in 2016.

Jones’s writing has appeared in Tin House, The Believer, The New York Times, McSweeney’s and Callaloo. A member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, she has also been a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, United States Artist Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship. Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, University of Iowa, and Arizona State University.  She is considered as not just one of the most renowned Black women writers in the country, she also has few peers in the writing of complex realities of contemporary southern literature.

Jones visits the Cornell campus in Ithaca as an ADW-PAL March 18-22. She was elected as an ADW-PAL in 2019. Her appointment runs through 2025.