Tayari Jones

Tayari Jones is an American novelist born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1970. She is the author of five novels: Leaving Atlanta (2002), The Untelling (2005), Silver Sparrow (2011), An American Marriage (2018), and Ghost (2024). Leaving Atlanta was a semi-autobiographical novel about the Atlanta child murders of 1979–1981, which happened during Jones's childhood. An American Marriage, her fourth novel, won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2019 and was an Oprah's Book Club selection; it follows a young professional Black couple in Atlanta after the husband is wrongfully convicted of rape. Jones has said she was moved to write the novel by a conversation with a man who had been wrongfully imprisoned, and the way both he and his wife had valid but irreconcilable perspectives on what the imprisonment had meant for their relationship. An American Marriage established Jones as one of the most important voices in contemporary American literary fiction. She is a professor at Emory University.