Tag: Tayari Jones

The Atlanta University Center has shaped generations of leaders—for the nation and for their home city. Atlanta would be nothing like it is today without it.

A roundup of yearbook photos of famous Atlanta University Center alumni, including Martin Luther King Jr., Samuel L. Jackson. Raphael Warnock, Stacey Abrams, Tayari Jones, and more.

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).

Cascade is distinct from nearby locales in that its residents don’t lack fresh food from traditional retailers. I was fascinated to learn that yet another grocer was moving in—even more so when I came across a city-created map of fresh-food options, where that cluster of stores stands in contrast to the rest of Southwest Atlanta, and the other predominantly Black neighborhoods where grocers are few and far between. Why the abundance in Cascade Heights? And how does a Black neighborhood that needs a grocer get one?

The best of Atlanta's arts and culture in 2019, including best new album, best surprise superstar, best up-and-coming director, best Instagrammable exhibition, and more.

Hard Times Require Furious Dancing—one of Alice Walker’s more than 40 books—is perhaps the most apropos title to describe her 75th birthday celebration, held at the Georgia Writers Museum in her hometown of Eatonton, Georgia last weekend.

Sophia Packard and Harriet Giles, two missionaries, traveled south to educate newly freed people after the Civil War. With the financial help of John and Laura Rockefeller, Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary is now known as Spelman College, one of the country’s most prestigious historically black colleges.

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.