Novel
Jacinda Townsend is the author of the forthcoming Trigger Warning (Graywolf, 2025) and Mother Country (Graywolf, 2022), winner of the 2023 Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence.
Her first novel, Saint Monkey (Norton, 2014), winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction, was an Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.
A former broadcast journalist and antitrust lawyer, she has written nonfiction for Al Jazeera and The White Review.
Jacinda is a graduate of Harvard University and holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She’s currently an Assistant Professor of Literary Arts in the MFA program at Brown University.
For more information, visit Jacinda’s website.
Featured Work
- Mother Country, Graywolf Press, 2022
- Saint Monkey, Norton, 2014
About Jacinda’s Class
- Class format will be a combination of writing exercises and manuscript workshopping/critiques.
- Novel manuscripts must be submitted before Workshop week; Jacinda will provide instructions and deadlines in advance.
- Students will need to provide critiques of their classmates’ manuscripts during Workshop week.
- Students can also expect in-class exercises, as well as some homework assignments during Workshop week.