Napa Bookmine Book Club: Moonrise Over New Jessup by Jamila Minnicks

Join us for a book club discussion on Thursday, February 20th, at 6:00pm! We'll be talking about Jamila Minnicks's Moonrise Over New Jessup. RSVP to let us know you're coming.

- Finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

- 2023 Southern Literary Review Book of the Year

- Winner of the 2024 BCALA First Novelist Award

- Named a Best/Most Recommended Book of January/2022 by the Chicago Review of Books and The Rumpus

- Winner of the 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and Finalist for the Center For Fiction First Novel Prize

It’s 1957, and after leaving the only home she has ever known, Alice Young steps off the bus into all-Black New Jessup, where residents have largely rejected integration as the means for Black social advancement. Instead, they seek to maintain, and fortify, the community they cherish on their “side of the woods.” In this place, Alice falls in love with Raymond Campbell, whose clandestine organizing activities challenge New Jessup’s longstanding status quo and could lead to the young couple’s expulsion—or worse—from the home they each hold dear. As they marry and raise children together, Alice must find a way to balance her undying support for Raymond's underground work with her desire to protect New Jessup from the rising pressure of upheaval from inside, and outside, their side of town.Based on the history of the many Black towns and settlements established across the country, Jamila Minnicks's heartfelt and riveting debut is both a timely examination of the opposing viewpoints that attended desegregation in America and a celebration of Black joy. 

"My favorite novels light up my brain with things I hadn’t considered before – and this one does exactly that. The deep complexity of the American Civil Rights movement; the various, sometimes opposing approaches of its leaders to desegregation; the gains and inevitable casualties that social progress can claim. With compelling characters and a heart-pounding plot, Jamila Minnicks pulled me into pages of history I’d never turned before."  — Barbara Kingsolver

“An absolutely breathtaking debut that celebrates Blackness in all of its triumphs. Both an in-depth exploration of all-Black towns and a love story all the same, Jamila Minnicks has written a stunning and poignant modern classic.” — Mary Louise Callaghan, Bookmarks, Winston-Salem, NC

Jamila Minnicks’ novel Moonrise Over New Jessup (Algonquin Books, 2023), won the 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, is a finalist for the 2023 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was longlisted the 2023 Crook’s Corner Book Prize. Her short stories and essays are published in The Sun, CRAFT, Catapult, Blackbird, The Write Launch, and elsewhere, and her piece, Politics of Distraction, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Jamila’s work has been supported by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Jamila is a graduate of the University of Michigan, the Howard University School of Law, and the Georgetown University Law Center. She lives in Washington, DC.

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