Tayari Jones on friendship, writing, and choosing your ‘Kin’
Fresh Air
NPR
4.3 • 36.1K Ratings
🗓️ 24 February 2026
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Eight years after her bestseller 'An American Marriage,' Tayari Jones has written a new novel, 'Kin,' set in the Jim Crow South. It follows two girls, Vernice and Annie, who grow up next door to each other without their mothers. That shared wound binds them and carries them through adulthood and across class lines. Jones says the idea for the book came from her own experience of losing a friend — and the particular kind of grief that the world doesn't always recognize. She spoke with Tonya Mosley about female friendship, growing up with civil rights activist parents, and the writing class that changed her life.'Kin' was just selected by Oprah’s Book Club.
Also, critic David Bianculli gives his take on the latest TV shows.
See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.
NPR Privacy Policy
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Support for NPR and the following message come from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, |
| 0:05.4 | investing in creative thinkers and problem solvers who help people, communities, and the planet flourish. |
| 0:11.1 | More information is available at Hewlett.org. |
| 0:14.7 | This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is novelist Tyari Jones. |
| 0:20.3 | She wrote her first novel more than two decades ago, |
| 0:23.4 | but it was her fourth, an American marriage, that put her into the national spotlight. |
| 0:28.5 | When it came out in 2018, Oprah chose it for her book club, and Barack Obama put it on his reading list. |
| 0:35.2 | It went on to win the women's prize for fiction and has been published |
| 0:38.6 | in more than a dozen countries, praised as a compassionate portrait of love and justice. By any measure, |
| 0:45.9 | Tari Jones had arrived, until she hit a wall, spending years on a new project that just wouldn't |
| 0:51.9 | come together. During that time, she was diagnosed with |
| 0:55.1 | Graves' disease, and her heart rate was so high she nearly had a stroke. Even as her vision |
| 1:00.6 | suffered, though, she put an eye patch on and kept writing. And what came out on the other side |
| 1:06.6 | is Kin, her latest novel set in 1950s, Louisiana, and Atlanta. It's about two girls, |
| 1:13.6 | Vernice and Annie, who grow up next door to each other without their mothers. One mother was |
| 1:19.0 | murdered, the other simply left. That shared wound binds them, but their lives take them in |
| 1:25.0 | different directions, one to Spelman College and Atlanta's Black Elite, |
| 1:29.6 | and the other on a journey through the Jim Crow South in search of the mother who had abandoned her. |
| 1:35.1 | With just one word for a title, Jones asks the question, the entire novel is built around. |
| 1:41.5 | Who is your kin? Is it blood or something more profound? |
| 1:46.0 | Tiari Jones, welcome to fresh air. Thank you for having me. |
| 1:50.5 | You know, I mentioned in my introduction that this book came after a difficult period in your life. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from NPR, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of NPR and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.