Jonathan Escoffery
Cola CasadosJonathan Escoffery is the author of the linked story collection, "If I Survive You," a New York Times Editor's Choice, an IndieNext Pick, and a National Bestseller. "If I Survive You" has been long-listed for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and is a finalist for the Southern Book Prize and the California Bookseller Alliance’s Golden Poppy Award. It has been praised by The New Yorker, The New York Times, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, People, Oprah Daily, GQ, Good Morning America online, Apple Books, Goodreads, Booklist, Vox, BuzzFeed, Vulture, L.A. Times, Shondaland, TIME, The Root, Vanity Fair, Kirkus, The Millions, BET, O Quarterly Magazine, Real Simple and elsewhere. Escoffery is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University.
Visit website | 
Awards: National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Plimpton Prize for Fiction, ASME Award for Fiction
Communities: African American
Heartache and Humor
Three of our favorite authors -- Jonathan Escoffery, Andrew Sean Greer and Rasheed Newson -- discuss how they balance levity and seriousness when writing about challenging topics.
Modern Languages Room 350 (Seats 318, Wheelchair accessible)
Sat, Mar 4, 10:00 am - 11:00 am
Fiction / Literature
Signing area: Sales & Signing Area - Central Mall (following presentation)
Panelists:
Jonathan Escoffery,
Andrew Sean Greer,
Rasheed Newson
Moderator: Emily Walsh
And So It Begins
Jonathan Escoffery, Kate Folk, and Caroline Frost all come to the festival with critically acclaimed, bestselling debut books. How did they do it? Where did they begin? Today, they will discuss their own journeys and the books that brought them to Tucson.
Student Union Kachina (Seats 100)
Sun, Mar 5, 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm
Fiction / Literature
Signing area: Sales & Signing Area - UA BookStore Tent (on Mall) (following presentation)
Panelists:
Jonathan Escoffery,
Kate Folk,
Caroline Frost
Moderator: Jenny Carrillo
Book:
If I Survive You
Fiction / Literature
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
September 2022
ISBN 9780374605988
272 pages
"If I Survive You is a collection of connected short stories that reads like a novel, that reads like real life, that reads like fiction written at the highest level.
This is where Jonathan Escoffrey's career begins. There are no limits to where he will go." —Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House
"Kaleidoscopic, urgent, hilarious, revelatory and like nothing you've read before." —Marlon James, author of Moon Witch, Spider King
A major debut, blazing with style and heart, that follows a Jamaican family striving for more in Miami, and introduces a generational storyteller.
In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. The family pushes on through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession, living in a house so cursed that the pet fish launches itself out of its own tank rather than stay. But even as things fall apart, the family remains motivated, often to its own detriment, by what their younger son, Trelawny, calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.”
Masterfully constructed with heart and humor, the linked stories in Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You centers on Trelawny as he struggles to carve out a place for himself. After a fight with Topper—himself reckoning with his failures as a parent and his longing for Jamaica—Trelawny claws his way out of homelessness through a series of odd, often hilarious jobs. Meanwhile, his brother, Delano, attempts a disastrous cash grab, and his cousin, Cukie, looks for a father. As each character searches for a foothold, they never forget the profound danger of climbing without a safety net.
Pulsing with vibrant lyricism and inimitable style, sly commentary and contagious laughter, Escoffery’s debut unravels what it means to be in between homes and cultures in a world at the mercy of capitalism and whiteness. With If I Survive You, Escoffery announces himself as a prodigious storyteller in a class of his own, a chronicler of American life at its most gruesome and hopeful. More/less
