Tayari Jones for Kin

"It's among Tayari's many gifts that she can touch us soul to soul with her words." - Oprah WinfreyThe Women's Prize winning author of _An American Marriage_, Tayari Jones, joins us this June.

Her latest novel, _Kin, _is a richly told novel about mothers and daughters, about a lifelong friendship, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South.

We hope to see you there!_Vernice and Annie are 'cradle friends', both born in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, both destined never to know their mothers.

The girls are inseparable, bound by a friendship far deeper than sisterhood, but as they grow up, their lives start to look very different in the segregated America of the 1950s and 60s.__Both girls leave Honeysuckle in search of something that might fill the hole left by their absent mothers: a university education, the promise of a first love affair, the hope offered by the simmering civil rights movement.

But it is Annie whose bad decisions pull her into a world of danger, leaving her oldest friend to battle to save her._Tayari Jones is the internationally bestselling author of four novels, most recently An American Marriage, winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2019.

Jones is the recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a United States Artist Fellowship, NEA Fellowship and a Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship.

She is also a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Born in Atlanta, Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, University of Iowa, and Arizona State University.

She is currently professor of Creative Writing at Emory University and an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.