Did you hear that? It’s cheers at the news that Tayari Jones is coming to Calgary on her North American tour, gifting us the rare opportunity to celebrate Kin, one of 2026’s most anticipated new novels. How, we wondered, could Jones top An American Marriage, her 2019 international bestseller? Well, she’s done it with Kin, which Ann Patchett calls “the kind of all-encompassing reading experience I’m always hoping to find: smart and funny and deftly profound.”
The conversation, hosted by Wordfest’s Creative Ringleader Shelley Youngblut, includes an audience Q & A and book signing, fuelled by Shelf Life Books. Want to be first in the signing line? You can pre-order Kin, along with Jones’s marvellous backlist—Barack Obama is a fan!—via this link and pick up your books at the show.
Shelley Youngblut
Engrossing Conversation
Dandy Bar, with non-alcoholic options
Audience Q&A
Book Signing
75 minutes. No intermission
Tayari Jones is the author of five novels, including 2019’s 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 Literary Prize, and an NAACP Image Award and has been published in two dozen countries.
Jones, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, has also been a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, United States Artist Fellowship, NEA Fellowship, and Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship. Her third novel, Silver Sparrow, was added to the NEA Big Read Library of classics in 2016.
Jones is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and lives in Atlanta.
A magnificent new novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage—Tayari Jones has written an unforgettable novel that sparkles with wit and intelligence and deep feeling about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy.
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 marries into an affluent family. Annie, abandoned by her dissolute 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, and culminate in a battle for her life.
A novel about mothers and daughters, about 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.
Shelley Youngblut
Engrossing Conversation
Dandy Bar, with non-alcoholic options
Audience Q&A
Book Signing
75 minutes. No intermission
Shelley Youngblut is the CEO & Creative Ringleader of Wordfest. She was the recipient of the 2020 Calgary Award for Community Achievement in the Arts and the 2018 Rozsa Award for Arts Leadership. She also won the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award at the Western Magazine Awards. Youngblut was the founding editor of Calgary’s award-winning Swerve magazine and has created magazines for ESPN, Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, Nickelodeon, Western Living, and The Globe and Mail. A former pop-culture correspondent for ABC World News Now and Canada AM, she was also a frequent contributor to CBC Calgary’s The Eyeopener, The Homestretch, and Daybreak Alberta.
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