An Afternoon With Tayari Jones

As part of Tulsa LitFest, we are thrilled to welcome Tayari Jones for an event to celebrate her latest book, Kin. Tayari will be in conversation with bookseller Sally Mercedes.

Kin is a novel about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy.

“Beautifully written and powerfully compelling. . . . Tayari Jones interrogates social injustice through the lens of personal relationships while exploring the ways in which it shapes those relationships, and she does this in language that is intimate, conversational, and musical all at once.” —Kirkus (starred review)

After the conversation, Tayari Jones will sign books. You can purchase a copy through Magic City Books ahead of time or at the event.

About the Book

A magnificent new novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage—Tayari Jones has written an unforgettable novel that sparkles with wit and intelligence and deep feeling about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy.

Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.

A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.

About the Author

Tayari Jones is the author of four novels, most recently An American Marriage, which was an Oprah’s Book Club selection and also appeared on Barack Obama’s summer reading list and his year-end roundup. It won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and an NAACP Image Award and has been published in two dozen countries. Jones is the C.H. Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and lives in Atlanta.

About the Moderator

Sally Mercedes (she/her) is a queer Dominican New Yorker who somehow found her way to Tulsa. With a degree in Psychology and Women's Studies, she is particularly passionate about social justice and liberation for all. Sally has contributed to Feminist Book Club, Latina Magazine, Bustle, The Stir, and other online publications. You can usually find her listening to an audiobook while baking, working on a jigsaw puzzle, or learning how to embroider.

Tulsa LitFest is brought to you by The Center for Poets and Writers, Tri City Collective, and Magic City Books.

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