Offsite: Justin Haynes presents Ibis

Event guidelines:

• All attendees are strongly encouraged to wear a face mask at all times.
• Tickets are limited to restrict capacity.
• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
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A bold, witty, magical new voice in fiction, Justin Haynes weaves a cross-generational Caribbean story of migration, superstition, and a search for family in the novel Ibis.
There is bad luck in New Felicity. The people of the small coastal village have taken in Milagros, an 11-year-old Venezuelan refugee, just as Trinidad’s government has begun cracking down on undocumented migrants—and now an American journalist has come to town asking questions.
New Felicity’s superstitious fishermen fear the worst, certain they’ve brought bad luck on the village by killing a local witch who had herself murdered two villagers the year before. The town has been plagued since her death by alarming visits from her supernatural mother, as well as by a mysterious profusion of scarlet ibis birds.
Skittish that the reporter’s story will bring down the wrath of the ministry of national security, the fishermen take things into their own hands. From there, we go backward and forward in time—from the town’s early days, when it was the site of a sugar plantation, to Milagros’s adulthood as she searches for her mother across the Americas.
In between, through the voices of a chorus of narrators, we glimpse moments from various villagers’ lives, each one setting into motion events that will reverberate outwards across the novel and shape Milagros’s fate.
With kinetic, absorbing language and a powerful sense of voice, Ibis meditates on the bond between mothers and daughters, both highlighting the migrant crisis that troubles the contemporary world and offering a moving exploration of how to square where we come from with who we become.

Justin Haynes is a fiction writer who was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, and later moved to Brooklyn. He holds degrees from St. Francis College, the University of Notre Dame, and Vanderbilt University. He has been awarded various residencies and fellowships, including from the Fine Arts Work Center, Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Vermont Studio Center, Emory University, Art Omi, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the Tin House Summer Workshop. His writing has been published in a variety of literary magazines and journals, including Caribbean Quarterly, SX Salon|Small Axe Project, and PREE. Haynes lives in Atlanta and teaches English and creative writing at Oglethorpe University.

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