Adult Book Club: “Let Us Descend” by Jesmyn Ward

Date/Time
Date(s) - 06/14/2024
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Location
Southeast Steuben County Library

Categories


This month’s book will be Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward (305 pages).

About the book: Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits: of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Annis leads readers through the descent, hers is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation.

About the Author: Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, the Strauss Living Prize, and the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. She is the historic winner—first woman and first Black American—of two National Book Awards for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Salvage the Bones (2011). She is also the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds and the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.

The Adult Book Club meets in-person at the Library on the second Friday of each month. If you have questions about the Book Club, please email Linda Reimer: reimerl@stls.org

 Check our calendar for future dates and book selections.