SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

Toni Morrison: Celebrating The 70th Anniversary of her Cornell Degree (MA 1955)
Cornell University’s Toni Morrison Collective in collaboration with the Toni Morrison Society invites the public to a symposium celebrating the 70th anniversary of her Cornell Degree (MA 1955). Among the international, distinguished, and emerging scholars and writers, presenters include:

• Tayari Jones (Emory University; A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell). Jones’ participation is part of an A.D. White Professors-at-Large mini-visit, Sept. 18-20, 2025.
• Louis Massiah ’77 (Founding Director (1982) & Current Executive Director, Scribe Video Center; A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell). Massiah visits Cornell as a Professor-at-Large April 6-10, 2026.
• NoViolet Bulawayo
• Farah Jasmine Griffin
• Ishion Hutchinson
• Claudine Raynaud
• Carolyn Rouse
• Autumn Womack
• Kevin Young
• Various high school artists

Registration required (no fee) by Sept. 1, 2025
Inquiries: tonimorrisoncoll@cornell.edu

Toni Morrison ’55 served as an A.D. White Professor-at-Large from 1997-2003.

Tayari 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.