Author event with Jesmyn Ward

Parnassus Books and Fisk University are thrilled to present an evening with Jesmyn Ward to celebrate her new book, On Witness and Respair, in conversation with ZZ Packer.

This ticketed event will take place on Monday, May 18th, at 6:30 p.m in the Appleton Room. Doors will open at 5:30 p.m. The Appleton Room is inside the historic Jubliee Hall on Fisk University's campus.

Tickets

Each ticket is $32.00 and includes a general admission seat and one signed copy of On Witness and Respair.

All books will be pre-signed, and there will be a signing line following the event for personalizations.

Parking:

Parking is accessible in a lot directly behind Jubilee Hall off Jefferson Street (close to the corner of Jefferson and D. B. Todd Blvd.) The published address is: 1000 17th Ave N, Nashville, TN 37208.

Free street parking is also available along Meharry Blvd (1720 Meharry Blvd., Nashville, TN 37208).

About the book:

The collected creative nonfiction of a singular American writer, Jesmyn Ward, including widely shared classics, three never-before-published speeches, and an introductory essay.

Respair (noun, obsolete), fresh hope after despair.

From the two-time National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author Jesmyn Ward, this collection of essays documents more than a decade of work in the life of a singular writer often lauded as "the heir apparent to Toni Morrison" ( LitHub). Beginning with her upbringing in a multigenerational household in rural Mississippi, the cradle of both her youth and her gift for storytelling, Ward brings her keen wisdom and hauntingly lyrical prose to a range of topics, following in her grandmother Dorothy's footsteps when she promises always to "Tell it straight. Tell it all."

True to her word, in these pages Ward contemplates the writers and novels of her youth and adulthood--the transformative power of discovering Octavia Butler as a twenty-something, the mirror that Richard Wright's novels held up to her own childhood, and of course, her lifelong love for Toni Morrison. Ward ruminates on her approach to both fiction and life, reflecting on the power of the novel, how to raise a Black son in an era of rising divisiveness and cruelty, as well as her own personal tragedies--including the titular essay of the collection, which tells the story of her partner's sudden death on the eve of the COVID-19 epidemic. Every bit as piercing and moving as her fiction, On Witness and Respair is a testament to Ward's powers as "one of America's finest living writers" ( San Francisco Chronicle) and is a monument to hope, beauty, and personal and collective resilience.

About the author:

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, the Strauss Living Prize, and the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. She is the winner of two National Book Awards for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing, and Salvage the Bones. She is also the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds and the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.

About ZZ Packer:

ZZ Packer is the author of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (2003). Her stories have been published in such journals as The New Yorker and Granta. ZZ has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy in Berlin Prize and a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship. She has taught at many institutions including Princeton, where she was a Hodder Fellow; the Michener Center at the University of Texas; Vassar College; and as a Jones Lecturer at Stanford. She received her education at Yale (BA), Johns Hopkins (MA), the University of Iowa (MFA), and Stanford as a Stegner Fellow. She is currently teaching at Vanderbilt University.

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