Tayari Jones

Jones was born and raised in Atlanta and studied at Spelman College, the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and Arizona State; she now teaches as the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University.

An American Marriage (2018), her fourth novel, follows a marriage upended when the husband is wrongly convicted and imprisoned, narrated partly through the couple's letters during his incarceration; it was an Oprah's Book Club selection and appeared on Barack Obama's year-end reading list, and won the Women's Prize in 2019.

The novel also won the Aspen Words Literary Prize, an NAACP Image Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.