Tayari Jones
The Chattanooga State Humanities Department’s Writers@Work (W@W) program presents the NEA’s Big Read Kick-Off Event with Tayari Jones and her novel, Silver Sparrow, on Thursday, Jan. 19, 2017.
The Big Read is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, Unum, Tennessee Arts Commission, and Chattanooga State Community College in partnership with the Chattanooga Public Library, Hunter Museum of Art, EPB, The Camp House, Star Line Books, Townsend Atelier, and the Southern Lit Alliance.
In 2015, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) selected Tayari Jones’s Silver Sparrow for inclusion in its Big Read library, and in 2016, the Writers@Work program received a Big Read Grant, which will allow the program to increase its reach into the Chattanooga community. With generous additional support from UNUM, Writers@Work has partnered with local high schools to supply free copies of Jones’s book and has extended its reach into the community by connecting with book clubs and developing engaging community programming for implementation during the Writers@Work event in April, 2017. This programming includes events at the Chattanooga Public Library, the Hunter Museum of Art, the Camp House, the ReCreate Cafe, Townsend Atelier, and the Bessie Smith Cultural Center.
To introduce Tayari Jones and Silver Sparrow to the Chattanooga community, the Writers@Work program will present Ms. Jones and her NEA Big Read novel, Silver Sparrow, at a Kick-Off event on January 19, 2017, at The Camp House, 149 East MLK Boulevard, in downtown Chattanooga. The event will begin at 6:00 p.m. with Ms. Jones’s personal reading from Silver Sparrow followed by a book signing. A dessert reception and musical entertainment will follow with the opportunity for attendees to speak with Ms. Jones about her writing life.
Tayari Jones was born and raised in Atlanta, where she spent most of her childhood with the exception of the one year that she and her family spent in Nigeria. Although she has not lived in her hometown for over a decade, much of her writing centers on the urban south. “Although I now live in the northeast,” she explains, “my imagination lives in Atlanta.”
Her first novel, Leaving Atlanta, is a coming of age story set during the city’s infamous child murders of 1979-81. Jones herself was in fifth grade when thirty African American children were murdered from the neighborhoods near her home and school. Her second novel, The Untelling, published in 2005, is the story of a family struggling to overcome the aftermath of a fatal car accident. She describes The Untelling as “a novel about personal history an individual and family myth-making. These personal stories are what come together to determine the story of a community, the unofficial history of a neighborhood, of a city, of a nation.”
Algonquin Books published Silver Sparrow, her third novel, in 2011. With the opening line of Silver Sparrow, “My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist,” author Tayari Jones unveils a breathtaking story about a man’s deception, a family’s complicity, and two teenage girls caught in the middle. Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon’s two families—the public one and the secret one.
The Village Voice wrote that, “Tayari Jones is fast defining black middle-class Atlanta the way that Cheever did for Westchester.” The American Booksellers chose Silver Sparrow as the #1 Indie Next Pick for June, 2011. Library Journal, O Magazine, Slate, and Salon all selected the novel among the best of the year. Silver Sparrow was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and the 2013 IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award.
A recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, The University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She has taught at numerous colleges including The University of Illinois, East Tennessee State University, and George Washington University. Currently, she is an Associate Professor in the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark University, where she received a Board of Trustees Award for Scholarly Excellence, and the Presidential Fellowship for Teaching Excellence. (Adapted from http://www.tayarijones.com/about/).
NEA Big Read is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest. To learn more about the NEA Big Read Program, go to: http://www.neabigread.org/
For more information on this event, contact Erica Lux in the Chattanooga State Humanities Department at: WritersAtWork@ChattanoogaState.edu or (423) 697-3233.