Tayari Jones on Coming Home to Herself

photo: Ben Rollins

“As writers, we need to come home. I think it’s a problem that there are huge swaths of the country that don’t really have popular writerly representation. Genius, gifts, skills are evenly distributed among people. So if there’s any group of people that’s not represented it’s because they’re being left out, and I think we have to go back and get them.”

Tayari Jones is the author of four novels, including the international bestseller, AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE. Her new novel, KIN, is out now from Random House. She is the winner of the Women’s Prize, Aspen Words Prize and NAACP Image award. She is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University and the A.D White Professor at large at Cornell University.