USC Fall Literary Festival with Jesmyn Ward

Great writers, readers and friends will gather for three author visits in September and October for the University of South Carolina Fall Literary Festival. Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, the festival brings unique and inspiring literary voices to campus.

The 2024 festival welcomes two-time National Book Award-winning novelist and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Jesmyn Ward, Edgar Grand Master award winner Walter Mosley, and Charleston-based memoirist and essayist Cinelle Barnes. They join more than 60 award-winning authors who have visited the USC campus for the festival, participating in readings, book signings and other events – all free and open to the community.

The Fall Literary Festival is a partnership between University Libraries and the Department of English, supported by the generous legacy of Libraries friend Dorothy D. Smith. Mrs. Smith was a lifelong book lover who wanted to share her passion with others. This year we are very pleased to partner with the Richland Library to bring Jesmyn Ward to campus and with the South Carolina Writers Association on Cinelle Barnes’ visit.

Wednesday, September 25, 2024 - Jesmyn Ward

Reading/Lecture, Q&A, book signing

Jesmyn Ward is the author of critically acclaimed and bestselling novels that include Let Us Descend, Sing, Unburied, Sing, and Where the Line Bleeds. She has been hailed as the standout writer of her generation and called “the new Toni Morrison.” Ward is the first woman and the first person of color to win two National Book Awards for Fiction and is also a MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient. Her stories are largely set on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, where she grew up and still lives. Her writing is deeply informed by the trauma of Hurricane Katrina and its social and economic repercussions. Her novel 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. Ward is the also the editor of the critically acclaimed anthology The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race, which NPR named one of the Best Books of 2016. She is a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans where she teaches creative writing. In 2016, she won the Strauss Living award, given every five years by the American Academy of Arts & Letters for literary excellence. In 2018, she was recognized among Time‘s 100 Most Influential People, and she is the winner of the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.

Host or Publisher University of South Carolina Libraries