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A Conversation with Jesmyn Ward and Joshua Henkin

Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library

June 28, 2012

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Jesmyn Ward surprised the literary world when she won the 2011 National Book Award for her second novel, Salvage the Bones, a “strikingly beautiful, taut, relentless and, by its end, indelible” book (San Francisco Chronicle) that follows a pregnant teenage girl and her family in the Mississippi coastal backwoods in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina and the immediate aftermath of the storm. A Professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama, Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds, was an Essence Magazine Book Club selection and the recipient of a Black Caucus of the American Library Association Honor Award.

“A devastating novel about love, hope, delusion, and the intricate ways in which time’s passage raises us up even as it grinds us down,” wrote Michael Cunningham of Matrimony, Joshua Henkin’s 2008 New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The Director of the MFA program in Fiction Writing at Brooklyn College, Henkin is also the author of Swimming Across the Hudson, a Los Angeles Times Notable Book. His short stories have been published in numerous publications, including Ploughshares, The Yale Review, and Boulevard. His new novel, The World Without You follows one family during a July 4th holiday weekend in the Berkshires a year after the youngest sibling, an intrepid journalist, was killed on assignment in Iraq.