Robert Jones Jr. was born the son of a Southern Baptist father and a mother who grew up in the Nation of Islam. Self-styled as “Son of Baldwin” on social media platforms, Jones is the Brooklyn-based author of the New York Times-bestselling debut novel The Prophets. The Prophets won the 2022 Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and was a Finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction.
Jones has also been published in the critically acclaimed anthologies Four Hundred Souls and The 1619 Project, The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning endeavor to reframe our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative.
Important inspirations for Jones include Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, two enormously influential Black authors of the 20th century. In his own words, “they are the bar that I reach for every time I write.” Both are included in the dedication page of The Prophets, credited as “Mother Morrison and Father Baldwin” in a list of blood relatives, the elders “whispering to me so that I, too, might share the testimony.”
The Prophets (2021) is a work of historical fiction set in the antebellum American Deep South on the Halifax plantation—called Empty by the enslaved men and women who work there day and night. In his debut novel, Robert Jones, Jr. imagines a love...
