The Art of the Short Story: Diane Oliver's Neighbors with Tayari Jones, Lan Samantha Chang, and Dawnie Walton

New York Times bestselling author Tayari Jones is the author of four novels, most recently An American Marriage, which was awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Jones, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, has also been a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, United States Artist Fellowship, and NEA Fellowship. Her third novel, Silver Sparrow, was added to the NEA Big Read Library of classics in 2016.

Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.

Lan Samantha Chang is the author of The Family Chao, a winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Fiction. A twenty-fifth anniversary edition of her first collection, Hunger: A Novella and Stories was recently published by W.W. Norton & Company. She is also the author of All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost and Inheritance, which won the PEN Open Book Award. Her short stories have been published in Harper’s Magazine, the Atlantic, and The Best American Short Stories. Since 2006, she has directed the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Dawnie Walton is the author of The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, winner of the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and the Audie Award for Fiction. Her debut novel was also named one of the best books of 2021 by the Washington Post, NPR, Esquire, and President Barack Obama. She is the cofounder and editorial director of Ursa, an audio production company celebrating contemporary writers of color, and cohosts its accompanying podcast. Formerly an editor at Essence and Entertainment Weekly, she has received fellowships from MacDowell and Tin House, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.