KIN w/ Tayari Jones and Jacqueline Woodson | Busboys and Poets Books

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.

Tayari Jones is joining us on the Busboys stage in conversation with award-winning writer Jacqueline Woodson to celebrate the launch of this novel and discuss “social injustice through the lens of personal relationships while exploring the ways in which it shapes those relationships” (Kirkus, starred review). Copies of the book will be available for purchase before, during, and after the event, and Jones will be signing following the program. You can also watch the discussion live and get your signed copy shipped by purchasing the “Livestream Admission + 1 Book Shipped” ticket option. 

This event requires purchase of the book for entry. Our program begins at 6:00 pm, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. Please note that this event is in person AND will be livestreamed. 

We ask that guests purchase tickets through Eventbrite in order to receive direct updates about the event from Busboys and Poets Books.

Tayari Jones is the author of five 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. Her latest novel is Kin. 

Jacqueline Woodson received a 2023 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, and the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. She has served as the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature and was named Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. In 2014, she received the National Book Award for her New York Times bestselling memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming. She also wrote the adult books Red at the Bone, a New York Times bestseller, and Another Brooklyn, a National Book Award finalist. In 2018, she founded BALDWIN FOR THE ARTS, a residency serving writers, composers, interdisciplinary, and visual artists of the Global Majority. Her most recent novel, Remember Us, is set in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.

BOOK DETAILS

Kin

By Tayari Jones 

February 24, 2026 | Hardcover, 368 pages, $32.00

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