This is an online only event.  Please click this LINK to register.

A Conversation with Jesmyn Ward

Chester Public Library is joining libraries across the state of Illinois to host award-winning author, Jesmyn Ward. Ward will discuss how her literary vision and personal experiences address urgent questions about racism and social injustice. The event will be held virtually on June 6th at 7:00 p.m.

     Hailed as “the new Toni Morrison” by the American Booksellers Association, MacArthur Genius and two-time National Book Award winner, Jesmyn Ward is the author of fiction, nonfiction, and memoir that The New York Times Book Review called “raw, beautiful, and dangerous.” In 2017 she became the first woman and first person of color to win the National Book Award 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. 

     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 in poverty. Ward edited the critically acclaimed anthology The Fire This Time :A New Generation Speaks About Race, a New York Times bestseller. Her newest novel, the critically acclaimed Sing, Unburied, Sing, won the 2017 National Book Award. “A searing, urgent read for anyone who things the shadow of slavery and Jim Crow have passed”