Join ASF for the third installment of Story Sessions, a literary series that brings exceptional authors together for a freewheeling discussion about the power of stories and the ways we share them, on September 10, 2026, at Huston-Tillotson University from 6 – 8:00 p.m.
We’re thrilled to welcome the internationally best-selling novelist Tayari Jones to the stage alongside celebrated writer ZZ Packer.
This event is free and open to the public and ASL interpretation will be provided. Books will be available for purchase onsite from First Light Books, a community bookstore in Hyde Park.
Public parking is available at the lot on Chalmers Ave. A limited number of accessible parking spaces are available on campus right next to the venue, King-Seabrook Chapel, and there is direct ramp access into the building. (You can also view this campus map here to orient yourself.)
Important Note: RSVP is required to access the event and spaces are limited. You will need to show your confirmation email along with ID when you check in at the gate at the front entrance.
Please RSVP here to save your spot!
This project is supported in part by the City of Austin Office of Arts, Culture, Music and Entertainment. Special thanks to our partners at Huston-Tillotson University.
About the Speakers
Over the course of her award-winning career, TAYARI JONES’S novels and essays have explored the vagaries of birth and fate, the bitterness of injustice, and the persistent power of love. From her debut, Leaving Atlanta, to her latest, the Oprah Book Club Selection and New York Times bestseller Kin, Jones brings warmth and wisdom to themes of family, friendship, and what it means to be a girl and a woman in the American South. Hailed as “one of the most important voices of her generation” by Essence and as “a bard of the modern South” by the Los Angeles Times, her vivid characters, trademark humor, and gorgeous prose have won her acclaim from readers and critics alike.
Kin is the tale of two motherless daughters—best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood—who are fated to live starkly different lives. Called “vibrant, funny, moving and powerful” (Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, author of The Mountains Sing) and “a future classic” (Roisin O’Donnell, author of Nesting), Kin was the second of Jones’s novels, after An American Marriage, to be chosen for Oprah’s Book Club, making her one of the rare authors selected more than once. It was named One of the Best Books of the Year (So Far) by The New York Times and Amazon.
ZZ PACKER’S fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, STORY, Ploughshares, GRANTA, Zoetrope All-Story, Best American Short Stories, Best Non-Required Reading and, most recently, 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories and The New York Times Magazine‘s “The 1619 Project.” She has contributed nonfiction to The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, The American Prospect, The Oxford American, The Guardian, The New York Times Book Review, The Believer, Essence, O Magazine, GQ, PORT, Salon, Newsweek, and The New Yorker. She is the recipient, among other honors, of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award, a Whiting Award, and a National Book Award 5 Under 35 prize. Packer has been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a Hutchins Fellow at Harvard University, a Knafel Fellow at The Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and a Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Packer teaches writing at Vanderbilt University. She has previously taught at Harvard, MIT, Brown, Stanford, Tulane, the MFA at Hunter College, and the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere and editor of New Stories from the South, 2008.