Author Event! Jacinda Townsend's Trigger Warning

Join us on Friday, September 19th at 6pm as we host Jacinda Townsend in conversation with Cherie Rowe to discuss her latest novel, Trigger Warning. Signed copies of the book are available for purchase.

About the book:

“Ruth, the embattled heroine of Jacinda Townsend's irresistible new novel, has endured more tragedy than most mere mortals can stand. Landscapes may change, she realizes, but grief, like time, is ever present and unrelenting. Complicated, contradictory, and compelling, Ruth gives the phrase ‘ride or die’ an unforgettable new dimension.”

—Jabari Asim, author of Yonder

She’d gotten no trigger warning. And her entire life, she wanted to scream now, had deserved a trigger warning.Early in life, Ruth survived a series of devastating events: Her little brother died from a childhood illness, her mother died of grief, and then her father was shot by the police right in front of their home. In the years following her father’s M**der, Ruth pushes her past underground. She changes her name and moves to Kentucky, marries a man named Myron, and together they raise a kid. It’s been two decades, and she is, by outside measures, living a good life—but why doesn’t it feel good? When her marriage comes to a sudden end, their house burns down in the middle of the night, and she learns that her estranged sister has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Ruth is jolted back into action. She flees again, this time back to her home state of California, with her nonbinary teenager in tow, perhaps ready at last to face her pain and retrieve her former self.Searing, surprisingly witty, and deeply human, Trigger Warning is a novel about the durational aftermath of anti-Black police violence. Through the perspectives of Ruth and Myron, and those of their friends and their child, Townsend explores divorce and desire, the heartbreaking brevity of parenting, the push and pull of old friendships, and the possibility, after incredible trauma, of reconnecting to what makes us feel alive.

About the author:

Jacinda Townsend is the author of Trigger Warning (Graywolf, 2025) and Mother Country (Graywolf, 2022), winner of the 2023 Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Townsend's first novel, Saint Monkey (Norton, 2014), winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction, was an Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. A former broadcast journalist and elected official, Townsend teaches in the Literary Arts program at Brown University.

About the moderator:

Cherie Rowe is a doctoral candidate in English and teaches at the University of Rhode Island. Her research interests include constructions of psychology and desire in 19thcentury literature and photography. Alongside thirty years of teaching experience in the UK, USA and Japan, Cherie acts, directs, and writes in all mediums. Her most recent performance was as Player Queen in Hamlet at The Gamm. She serves on the LitArts RI B/I/POC Advisory Committee and is a frequent writing workshop facilitator for the Future Perfect Project. She is dedicated to inspiring others to find their creative magic and to share it. Her hometown is Birmingham, England although she now lives in Providence with her books, and two cats; Yin and Bella Bella Bam Bam.

Host or Publisher Symposium Books Staff