Tayari Jones
1 book analyzed
Biography
Tayari Jones (b. 1970) grew up in Atlanta, the daughter of two academics. Her father, a pharmacologist, was once falsely arrested — an experience that planted the seed for An American Marriage decades before she wrote it. Jones has spoken publicly about watching her father handcuffed and knowing, as a child, that innocence was no protection. She attended Spelman College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and she has spent her career writing about Black Atlanta — the neighborhoods, the class structures, the specific texture of Black middle-class Southern life that is rarely depicted in American fiction. An American Marriage was selected for Oprah's Book Club in 2018, immediately launching it to bestseller status and amplifying its themes into national conversation at a moment when mass incarceration reform was entering mainstream political discourse.