MFA candidates Peter Williams and Chantel Kelly interview Tayari Jones during her visit to Lexington, Kentucky for the University of Kentucky Gaines Center for the Humanities 2019 Bale Boone Symposium.New York Times best-selling author, Tayari Jones, is the author four novels, most recently An American Marriage . Published in 2018, An American Marriage is an Oprah’s Book Club Selection and also appeared on Barack Obama’s summer reading list as well as his end of the year roundup. The novel was awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Orange Prize), Aspen Words Prize and an NAACP Image Award. With over 500,000 copies in print domestically, it has been published in two dozen countries.