Tayari Jones is a New York Times best-selling author and academic known for her novels Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, Silver Sparrow, and An American Marriage. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, The Believer, The New York Times, and Callaloo.

Published in 2018, An American Marriage was selected for Oprah's Book Club and appeared on Barack Obama's summer reading list. It won the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction, the Aspen Words Prize, and an NAACP Image Award. The novel has been published in two dozen countries.

Jones has received numerous accolades, including the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a United States Artist Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and a Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship. Her third novel, Silver Sparrow, was added to the NEA Big Read Library of classics in 2016.

Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, the University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is currently a member of the English faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at Emory University, where she holds the title of Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing. She also served as an Andrew D. White Professor-at-large at Cornell University.