USC Fall Literary Festival 2024: Jesmyn Ward
Novelist, memoirist and nonfiction writer Jesmyn Ward is the author of critically acclaimed and bestselling novels that include Let Us Descend, Sing, Unburied, Sing, and Where the Line Bleeds. She has been hailed as the standout writer of her generation and called “the new Toni Morrison.” Ward is the first woman and the first person of color to win two National Book Awards for Fiction and is also a MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient. Her stories are largely set on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, where she grew up and still lives. Her writing is deeply informed by the trauma of Hurricane Katrina and its social and economic repercussions. Her novel Salvage the Bones, winner of the 2011 National Book Award, is a troubling but ultimately empowering tale of familial bonds set amid the chaos of the hurricane. Ward is the also the editor of the critically acclaimed anthology The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race, which NPR named one of the Best Books of 2016. She is a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans where she teaches creative writing. In 2016, she won the Strauss Living award, given every five years by the American Academy of Arts & Letters for literary excellence. In 2018, she was recognized among Time‘s 100 Most Influential People, and she is the winner of the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
Event Links
Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/2620375-0
