The Modern Novel Lecture: Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward

Two-time National Book Award-winner and MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient Jesmyn Ward delivers the 2024 Modern Novel Lecture.

Ward has been hailed as the standout writer of her generation, proving her “fearless and toughly lyrical” voice in novels, memoir, and nonfiction. She is the author of Salvage the Bones, winner of the 2011 National Book Award; Sing, Unburied, Sing, winner of the 2017 National Book Award; the memoir Men We Reaped; and the novel, Let Us Descend.

6 pm reception/6:30 pm program
Free to members/$25 nonmembers
Registration required. Please note date change. You do NOT need to register for new date.

Jesmyn Ward 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 2017, she was recognized with a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant for her work “exploring the enduring bonds of community and familial love among poor African-Americans of the rural South against a landscape of circumscribed possibilities and lost potential.” 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.