Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Monday 07 May
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
‘I know you’re innocent, there is not one doubt in my mind, but I also know that you’re not here.’
How much disruption can love endure?
With her latest novel, An American Marriage, Tayari Jones immerses readers in the inner worlds of Celestial and Roy – an ambitious newlywed African American couple on the brink of a promising future together. Suddenly, one year into their marriage, Roy is convicted of a crime they both know he didn’t commit.
Roy’s incarceration sets the scene for a complex, heartbreaking love story that navigates fidelity, obligation and the weight of the past. Told in part through an incisively crafted series of prison letters, the book brings broad social ideas – the American Dream, the New South, the racism of the judicial system and the prison industrial complex – into an intimate negotiation of desires and disappointments.
Alongside her latest Oprah-approved novel, Jones has written three previous works of fiction – Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, and Silver Sparrow – all set in her hometown of Atlanta. She visits the Wheeler Centre this May to discuss her writing – and how we grapple with the intrusions of chance, timing and history into our lives.
Paperback Books will be our bookseller at this event.
Featuring
Tayari Jones
Tayari Jones is the author of four novels, including Silver Sparrow, The Untelling, and Leaving Atlanta. Jones holds degrees from Spelman College, Arizona State University, and the University of Iowa. She serves on the MFA faculty at Rutgers and blogs on writing at www.tayarijones.com/blog. She lives in Brooklyn.
An Associate Professor in the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark University, she is spending the 2017-18 academic year as the Shearing Fellow for Distinguished Writers at the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Bhakthi Puvanenthiran
Bhakthi Puvanenthirani is the Entertainment Editor at the ABC. Previously the Editor of ABC Everyday and Managing Editor of Crikey, a journalist and editor at The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, she has also co-hosted ...