Tayari Jones: Day One

Tayari Jones was born and raised in Atlanta. Her first novel, Leaving Atlanta, about the infamous Atlanta child murders of 1979-81, received the Hurston/Wright Award for Debut Fiction. Her second novel, The Untelling, was awarded the Lillian C. Smith Award for New Voices from the Southern Regional Council and the University of Georgia Libraries. She has also received fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Arizona Commission for the Arts and le Chateau de Lavigny in Switzerland. An assistant professor of English at the MFA program at Rutgers University in Newark, she is currently completing her third novel, closing a projected trilogy set in her home state of Georgia.

She will be visiting the Queens College campus on Monday, April 14 @ 6 PM.

Each day this week the Bulletin Blog will feature glimpses into Jones’ insights on the writing process, the writing profession and the writer’s identity. Follow the links to read the full articles or essays.



My MFA advisor, Ron Carlson, once told me that writers are either gushers or ekers. Ekers are the romantic sorts that stare at the page for an hour and a half and then carefully write down four perfect words. Gushers are people like me-- or at least people like I used to be-- who write four or five pages in a sort of frenzy. And then they look it over and decide that there is only a half-page of useable writing. That's how I used to be. When I write, I was like me-- on crack. But now, my patterns have changed.