Title: 2026 Bedri Distinguished Writers Series: Jesmyn Ward
Please join us for the 2026 lecture in the Bedri Distinguished Writers Series, featuring two-time National Book Award winning author and novelist Jesmyn Ward.
JESMYN WARD—Hailed as “the new Toni Morrison” by the American Booksellers Association, MacArthur Genius and two-time National Book Award winner. 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—joining the ranks of William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Philip Roth, and John Updike. Ward’s novels, primarily set on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, are deeply informed by the trauma of Hurricane Katrina. Ward’s first historical novel, the New York Times best seller Let Us Descend, tells the astonishing story of Annis, an enslaved teenage girl who is sold by her white father after being separated from her mother. An Oprah’s Book Club pick, Let Us Descend incorporates elements of Dante’s Inferno, magical realism, and slave narratives in a story about grief, resilience, imagination, and kinship that stitches the Black American experience into the very land. Her critically acclaimed novel Sing, Unburied, Sing, won the 2017 National Book Award, andwas nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. 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. Men We Reaped: A Memoir, deals with the loss of five young men in her life—to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that follows people who live in poverty. Ward edited the critically acclaimed anthology The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, a New York Times bestseller. A professor of creative writing at Tulane University and contributing editor to Vanity Fair, Ward’s many honors include a Strauss Living Award.
Full Bio Here:Lyceum Agency: Jesmyn Ward
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The Bedri Distinguished Writers Series is made possible by a generous gift from Dr. Jonathan Bedri.