Access Services: ASL Interpretation, Assisted Listening Devices, Real-time Captioning
Location
Schedule and Tickets
Free but registration required online or call 612-624-2345, or email umntix@umn.edu. Those attending are encouraged to wear masks, to self-screen for COVID-19 symptoms using the Stay Safe MN Health Screening Checklist, and to wash hands often, get tested, and stay home when ill or exhibiting symptoms of COVID-19.
About the Show
Oct. 26, 2023
Jesmyn Ward presents her new novel Let Us Descend. Ward is the MacArthur Fellow and two-time National Book Award-winning author of Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage the Bones. One thousand copies of Let Us Descend will be given away (winning registrants via a random drawing will be notified in advance with instructions on how to pick up books at the reading). This free event at the Carlson Family Stage is moderated by English Professor and novelist V. V. Ganeshananthan and co-sponsored by the Department of African American and African Studies.
Hailed as “the new Toni Morrison” by the American Booksellers Association, Ward is the youngest person to receive the Library of Congress’s Prize for American Fiction and the first woman and first person of color to win the National Book Award for Fiction twice. Ward’s first historical novel, Let Us Descend tells the story of an enslaved teenage girl sold by her white father after being separated from her mother, incorporating elements of Dante’s Inferno, magical realism, and slave narratives to explore grief, resilience, imagination, and kinship. Ward is also the author of Men We Reaped: A Memoir (2013) and edited the critically acclaimed anthology The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, a New York Times bestseller. Ward is a professor of creative writing at Tulane University.
More Information about Jesmyn Ward Reading & Conversation - ASL/OC