Go to → Edward P. Jones

Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist and short-story writer Edward P. Jones is interviewed by poet E. Ethelbert Miller, who draws the private, thoughtful Jones into an illuminating conversation about his writing process, the intersections of imagination and life, and the origins of his characters in Lost in the City and The Known World. Jones describes his own process, and the way he approaches the teaching of creative writing, in geographical terms: the scaling of a mountain, the need for good maps. Questioned about what it might feel like to be "the Tiger Woods of American Literature," with the prizes, reviews, and accolades for The Known World, Jones describes how each new story leaves him at the bottom of the mountain, with only his own imaginative maps, his foresight into the key moments leading to his characters' final destinations, to keep him from getting lost. Jones also speaks of the influence of his mother and how "a certain cadence...a certain poetry" in her language shapes the voices in his short stories, and how The Known World is dedicated to "what she could have been...if it had been a better world."