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A Conversation with Tayari Jones and Danielle Evans

Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library

June 28, 2011

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Tayari Jones is a novelist and short-story writer whose fiction often focuses on the urban south. In Leaving Atlanta—winner of the Hurston/Wright Award for Debut Fiction—Jones sets the scene in Atlanta during the early 1980s when a number of African American children were murdered, many near her childhood home. In her second novel, The Untelling, Jones tells the story of a family recovering and struggling after a fatal car accident. With the opening line of Silver Sparrow, “My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist,” Jones unveils a story about a man’s deception, a family’s complicity, and two teenage girls who imagine themselves growing up to be nothing like their mothers. Danielle Evans’s debut collection of short stories, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, presents a heartrending and clear depiction of coming of age in 21st-century America, with vivid characters who span boundaries of race, class, relationships, and family, but can’t seem to remain grounded long enough to connect with those they love. Praised by Salman Rushdie and the Paris Review as a literary prodigy, Evans is a professor of literature at American University and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.