Offsite Book Event: Tayari Jones at Wilson Abbey

We are very excited to host an offsite event with Tayari Jones to celebrate the release of her new novel, Kin. For this event, Tayari will be joined in conversation by Luvvie Ajayi Jones. We are excited to co-present this event with Zora's Place.

This is a ticketed, off-site event, which will be hosted at Wilson Abbey, 935 W. Wilson Ave, Chicago, IL, 60640. This event will include a reading, conversation, and book signing.

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.
"Kin is the kind of all-encompassing reading experience I’m always hoping to find: smart and funny and deftly profound. This is Tayari Jones’s very best work.” —Ann Patchett, author of Tom Lake
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 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 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 and lives in Atlanta. Her forthcoming novel is Kin.

LUVVIE AJAYI JONES is a 4-time NYT bestselling author, speaker and book coach who thrives at the intersection of culture, business and leadership. She's the CEO and Chief Visionary Officer of Awe Luv Media, and founder of The Book Academy. She has written 5 critically acclaimed bestselling books (including her banner book Professional Troublemaker: The Fear-Fighter Manual and her Little Troublemaker children’s book series), establishing her as a literary force with a powerful pen. A prolific writer, she’s also contributed to 5 published anthologies. The University of Illinois alum is a true force in the world and her work has been featured in such outlets as Fortune, Forbes, Inc, Fast Company, The Chicago Tribune, Variety and more.

Accessibility: This event is hosted at Wilson Abbey, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Face masks are strongly encouraged but not required. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email [email protected] by no later than 14 days before the event. We have a limited number of free tickets available to low/no-income folks who may want to attend this event, please email us at [email protected] and we can issue you a ticket if cost is a barrier. For other questions or access needs, please email [email protected].

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