The New York Times bestselling author Tayari Jones is headed to Adelphi University’s Performing Arts Center for a fireside chat about her award-winning book, “An American Marriage.”
The discussion, moderated by Renaire Frierson, Adelphi’s Title IX coordinator and director of equity and compliance, will take place on Thursday, Feb. 27, from 7 to 8 p.m. in the Adelphi Performing Arts Center’s Olmstead Theatre.
Over the course of her award-winning career, Tayari Jones’ novels and essays have explored the vagaries of birth and fate, the bitterness of injustice, and the persistent power of love.
With her most recent novel, “An American Marriage,” a love story torn apart by social injustice, she “has emerged as one of the most important voices of her generation,” according to Essence.
Former President Barack Obama, on selecting the novel for his summer reading list, called it a “moving portrayal of the effects of a wrongful conviction on a young African-American couple” and the book was also an Oprah’s Book Club selection.
In her novel, Jones introduces us to Celestial and Roy, a newlywed couple standing on the threshold of the American Dream. When Roy is arrested and sentenced to 12 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, their lives implode. And when his conviction is overturned five years later, both must navigate the unimaginable fallout of their enforced estrangement.
In 2019, Jones was awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Orange Prize), the Aspen Words Prize, and an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Fiction. “An American Marriage” has been published in over 20 countries, with more than 700,000 copies in print domestically.
A member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, Jones has earned a United States Artist Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship, and a fellowship from the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, O, The Oprah Magazine, Time, Tin House, and The Believer, among other outlets.
Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, the University of Iowa, and Arizona State University, and is currently a Charles Howard Candler Professor at Emory University and an A.D. White Professor-At-Large at Cornell University. Her next novel, “Old Fourth Ward,” will tell the story of a woman grappling with the idea of home, family, and identity.
The event is open to the public. Tickets are free for Adelphi students, staff and alumni and $5 for the general public. For tickets and event information visit, adelphi.edu/TayariJones.
Submitted by Adelphi University
