Jacinda Townsend
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12
CRAFT TALK
Title TBA
3:30-4:45 p.m., Beacon Heights Room
READING
7:30 p.m., Beacon Heights Room, 417 Plemmons Student Union
Jacinda Townsend is the Appalachian Writer in Residence at Berea College. She is the author of Saint Monkey (Norton, 2014), which is set in 1950s Eastern Kentucky and won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction. Saint Monkey was also the 2015 Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.
Townsend grew up in south central Kentucky and took her first creative writing class at Harvard, where she earned her B.A. While at Duke University Law School, she cross-registered in the English department and took several formative writing workshops. In 1999, after four years as a broadcast journalist and then a lawyer in New York City, Townsend went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received her M.F.A. She spent a year as a Fulbright fellow in Côte d’Ivoire, and recently finished a novel called Kif.