Award-winning Atlanta author Tayari Jones earned an even more unique distinction earlier this year when she joined the elite club of writers who’ve had more than one book chosen for Oprah’s Book Club.
Oprah Winfrey had already chosen Jones’ lauded fourth novel, “An American Marriage,” in 2018, but then surprised her in February by selecting the newly published “Kin.” The novel debuted at number three on the New York Times bestseller list.
Jones will discuss “Kin” with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown on Monday, April 6, at 5:30 p.m. at Glenn Memorial Chapel at Emory University. The book launch event is free to attend.
“Kin” follows Annie and Vernice (Niecy), two motherless girls raised together in 1950s Honeysuckle, Louisiana. After losing their mothers under different circumstances, the girls form a deep bond. As they become teenagers, Niecy leaves for Spelman College and marries into an affluent Black family, while Annie sets out across the Jim Crow South in search of the mother who abandoned her.
Jones said the creation of “Kin” began as a word doodle during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
“There were so many problems in the world, and everything seemed so urgent,” Jones recalled. “I had a hard time plugging into fiction and creativity, so I was not doing the work. I had writer’s block.”
One day, she started doing a world doodle on a notepad, penciling in words and phrases that came to mind without thinking too much about them. Out of that exercise, Niecy and Annie began to emerge.
“These characters just appeared, and the setting immediately became the 1950s, which I knew nothing about. I’m a contemporary author.”
Before she knew it, Jones had 100 pages of the story.
The novel is told through Niecy and Annie’s alternating perspectives, so Jones wrote 100 pages in each woman’s voice, creating two distinct characters in the process.
Writing a book set in the 1950s and 60s also gave Jones the opportunity to research more about the city she grew up in. She drew on her own time at Spelman College, where she was class historian, to flesh out Niecy’s experience, and also revisited the life of noted Spelman alum Dovey Johnson Roundtree, who worked three jobs to put herself through college before becoming a famed civil rights attorney and activist.
Jones is a stickler for details, so she also pored over old Sears catalogs to get clothing details just right for the time periods.
She also didn’t shy away from exploring queer characters in an era where their lives and relationships were hidden. School teacher Raynelle and her partner, Ola Mae, are sassy, self-appointed guardians for Niecy, who later has her own queer relationship with a female student at Spelman.
“I didn’t want to write a world where queer people had no possibilities for pleasure in their lives,” Jones said. “Queer people are under siege just for living their lives – they’re putting their bodies on the line. It felt important to write these characters’ stories, and not be afraid of writing them.”
A professor of English and Writing at Emory University, Jones moved back to Atlanta almost a decade ago after a stint in New York City. She was surrounded by writers and would-be writers (“There is something in the water up there.”), but felt the itch to be back in the place she was writing about.
At home in Grant Park, Jones had a contract to write a novel dealing with the gentrification of East Atlanta and was facing a deadline, but Niecy and Annie had fully taken hold of her imagination.
An early morning writer, Jones moved her workspace to the kitchen. “It’s a hard chair and a hard table,” she said. “I didn’t want to get comfortable somewhere and start daydreaming. I needed a situation room, and that was my kitchen.”
She knocked out the rest of “Kin” in two months, sitting in that “situation room.” Her publisher was surprised, but trusted Jones’ storytelling.
Jones said she plans to return to the gentrification novel after promotion work for “Kin.” She said “surrendering to the muse” helped bring that story into more focus as well.
“You hear about writers who wait for the muse to arrive, surrender to the muse, but that was never me,” Jones laughed. “I didn’t feel like I was in control of writing ‘Kin,’ so I’m ready to go back to my normal writing place.”
