Tag: An American Marriage

Tayari Jones—author, professor, and griot of the American South—has a lot on her plate. She teaches a creative writing class at Emory University, she has book blurbs due and forewords to file, and she has words in a just-released craft book, How We Do It, where her Emory colleague Jericho Brown gathered Black writers to explain “how they go about making what they make.” “I know I have a novel,” Jones writes, “when I have a question to which I don’t know the moral/ethical answer.” She is also putting the finishing touches on her fifth and forthcoming novel, Old Fourth Ward, which is set squarely in Black Atlanta’s centers of gravity: the historic neighborhood adjacent to downtown Atlanta (and the book’s namesake) and Cascade Heights (her old stomping grounds).

Tayari Jones, a Spelman College graduate, is the author of four novels—her latest, An American Marriage, was handpicked for Oprah’s Book Club earlier this year. Amid months of book tour stops and after years immersed in New York’s publishing world, the prolific author is moving back to her hometown. Our Q&A with her.