By Malachi Thornton
College of Fine Arts and Communication Media Office
CONWAY–Tayari Jones will visit the University of Central Arkansas Friday, Nov. 3 as a speaker for the C. D. Wright Women Writers Conference.
Her keynote reading at 6 p.m. in the College of Business auditorium is free and open to the public. All other conference events require registration.
She will also be an artist-in-residence at UCA and will be holding a question-and-answer session with students at 11 a.m. Friday in Thompson Hall 331.
“Jones was chosen as a visiting writer and to keynote the opening of the conference because of her award-winning fiction and because of her success as a woman writer,” said Sandy Longhorn, assistant professor of Creative Writing. “This personal interaction with writers like Jones is one of the great benefits of the UCA Artist-in-Residence program.”
Jones is the author of the novels “Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, Silver Sparrow” and “An American Marriage” (Algonquin Books, February 2018). She is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Believer and Tin House.
The first novel she wrote, “Leaving Atlanta,” which was based on her experiences as a child growing up during the Atlanta Child Murders of 1979-81, won the 2003 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for debut fiction.
She’s been the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and a member of the United States Artist Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship.
For more information or to learn about attending the conference, visit http://www.cdwrightconference.org/ or contact Longhorn at 501-450-5108 or slonghorn@uca.edu.
The Artist in Residence program is funded by UCA’s arts fee and is administered by the College of Fine Arts and Communication. For more information about the program, call the Office of the Dean, College of Fine Arts and Communication, at 501-450-3293.
The UCA College of Fine Arts and Communication includes the Departments of Art, Music, and Film, Theatre and Creative Writing as well as the School of Communication. The college’s primary mission is the preparation of the next generation of artists, educators and communicators. For more information about CFAC, visit www.uca.edu/cfac or call 501-450-3293.
