credit: julie jarborough
“Smart and funny and deftly profound. This is Tayari Jones’s very best work.”—Ann Patchett
We are delighted that Tayari Jones, the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage, will be joining us at Kepler’s for the first time to talk about her magnificent new novel, Kin. The story of two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart, Jones’s narrative sparkles with wit, intelligence, and deep feeling.
About the Book
Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.
A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.
About the Speakers
Tayari Jones is the author of four novels, most recently An American Marriage, which was an Oprah’s Book Club selection and also appeared on Barack Obama’s summer reading list and his year-end roundup. It won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Aspen Words Prize, and an NAACP Image Award and has been published in two dozen countries. Jones is the C. H. Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing and lives in Atlanta.
Natalie Baszile is the author of the forthcoming novel Good People. Her previous novel, Queen Sugar, was adapted for seven television seasons by writer/director Ava DuVernay, and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey. Queen Sugar was named one of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Best Books of 2014 and nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Her non-fiction book, We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land & Legacy was an Amazon Editor’s Pick and was a Wall Street Journal Book of the Year, 2021. Natalie's non-fiction essays have appeared in National Geographic, The Bitter Southerner, O, The Oprah Magazine, and numerous anthologies. Natalie has had residencies at the Ragdale Foundation, Virginia Center for the Arts and Hedgebrook. She was a SFFILM Resident and received the SFFILM / Bonnie Rattner fellowship at the Djerassi Resident Arts Program.
COVID SAFETY PROTOCOLS: We strongly encourage attendees to wear masks at our events, although they will NOT be required. We will have masks available for attendees who want them. Do NOT attend the event if you, or any member of your family, have any respiratory symptoms (e.g. cough, runny nose, and/or sore throat), or have had a significant exposure to someone who has tested positive for COVID-19.
ACCESSIBILITY: We never want cost to be a barrier to admission for our community. Please email events [at] keplers [dot] org if you would like to attend this event but cannot afford a ticket. To request an accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) for this event, please email events [at] keplers [dot] org at least one week prior to the event.