Parnassus Presents: Tayari Jones with Major Jackson

Parnassus Books is excited to bring you our event with Tayari Jones in celebration of her latest novel, Kin. She is in conversation with poet and professor Major Jackson. This event was recorded live on the Parnassus stage on Monday, February 23, 2026. Buy a copy of Kin from Parnassus: https://bit.ly/4nFiSDU ABOUT THE BOOK: 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 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 AUTHOR: 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 Literary 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 at Emory University and lives in Atlanta. ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER: Major Jackson is the author of six volumes of poetry. His honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. The poetry editor of the Harvard Review and the host of the podcast The Slowdown, Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. .............................................................................................................................. Intro & Outro Music "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License