Tayari Jones: 2025 Zale-Kimmerling Writer-in-Residence

Join us for an evening with Tayari Jones.

New York Times best-selling author Tayari Jones is the author of four novels, most recently An American Marriage. The novel was awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Aspen Words Prize, and an NAACP Image Award. It has been published in two dozen countries. Jones, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, has also been a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, United States Artist Fellowship, NEA Fellowship, and Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship. Her third novel, Silver Sparrow, was added to the NEA Big Read Library of classics in 2016. Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.

Each year since 1985, the Zale-Kimmerling Writer-in-Residence Program has brought a renowned woman writer to campus. The program was established by Dana Zale Gerard (NC ‘85), and made possible by an annual gift from the M.B. and Edna Zale Foundation of Dallas, Texas. In 2010, the program became fully endowed through a gift from Martha McCarty Wells (NC’63), and known as the Zale-Kimmerling Writer-in-Residence program.