New York Times best-selling author Tayari Jones is the author of five novels, most recently Kin. Published in 2026, it is an Oprah’s Book Club Selection. The New York Times and Amazon editors have named it the best novel of the year so far. She is also among the TIME100 list of the most influential people in the world. Her previous novel, An American Marriage, was also an Oprah’s Book Club Selection and appeared on Barack Obama’s summer reading list. The novel was awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Aspen Words Prize and an NAACP Image Award. It has been published in two dozen languages.

Jones, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, has also been a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, United States Artist Fellowship, NEA Fellowship, and Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship. Her third novel, Silver Sparrow, was added to the NEA Big Read Library of classics in 2016.

Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.