Saint Monkey was also the 2015 Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Saint Monkey won the 2015 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for best fiction written by a woman and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for that year’s best historical fiction. Jacinda is also the author of Saint Monkey (Norton, 2014), which is set in 1950’s Eastern Kentucky and is a love letter to a Black community that has all but disappeared. Mother Country is told in the voices of an American woman struggling with infertility who kidnaps a young Moroccan girl, and the young mother, escaped from Mauritanian slavery, who loses her. Later that same year, on a trip to Northern Mali, she also first witnessed modern-day slavery: that incident inspired the research that eventually took her to Mauritania, where she met with escaped slaves and anti-slavery activists and began the work that would become her novel, Mother Country, published by Graywolf Press in 2022.
After four years of being first a broadcast journalist and then an antitrust lawyer in New York City, Jacinda went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received her MFA before going on to spend a year as a Fulbright fellow to Côte d’Ivoire.ĭuring her Fulbright year, on a layover in Morocco, Jacinda discovered the city of Marrakech and fell in love. It was there that she took her first creative writing classes while at Duke Law School, she cross-registered in the English department, where she took her next few formative writing workshops. Jacinda Townsend grew up in Southcentral Kentucky and left for Harvard at the age of sixteen. in Sanborn Library. Email with quesitons or access needs.
The English and Creative Writing Department invites you to the Cleopatra Mathis Poetry and Prose Series on Thursday, September 29, with a reading by Jacinda Townsend.
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