Jesmyn Ward, author of Let Us Descend

Jesmyn Ward, celebrated as “the heir apparent to Toni Morrison” (LitHub) and one of the most acclaimed novelists of her generation, will deliver the 2025 David P. Gardner Graduate Lecture in the Humanities and Fine Arts.

Book signing to follow, with sales by The King’s English Bookshop

Ward is the author of Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), both winners of the National Book Award, as well as editor of the influential anthology, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race (2016). Her work explores the rural South, race, environmental justice, and historical memory.

Her most recent novel, Let Us Descend (2023), an Oprah Book Club pick, was named one of the year’s best books by The Washington Post, Time, The New Yorker, and others. The title, drawn from Dante’s Inferno, reflects the novel’s engagement with history and spirit. NPR described it as “the literary equivalent of an open wound from which poetry pours.”

Ward is professor of English and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Tulane University.

See also:

Mike Broida, Home Is a Hymn: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward — Los Angeles Review of Books
Julien Murphet, A cosmic ocean of shame: Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend confronts a history beyond the ken of storytelling — The Conversation
Parul Sehgal, Surviving Katrina (review of Salvage the Bones) — New York Times

For updates and more events, join our mailing list.

The David P. Gardner Graduate Lecture in the Humanities and Fine Arts is administered by the Tanner Humanities Center in collaboration with the College of Humanities and the College of Fine Arts. The Gardner Lecture was founded in the University of Utah Graduate School in honor of former President David Pierpont Gardner. The Gardner Lecture features distinguished scholars and artists from the humanities and the fine arts in alternating years. The lectureship is funded by the Tanner Lectures on Human Values.

The Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah supports academic research, public engagement, and educational programming in the humanities. Views expressed in events and programming do not represent the official views of the Center or University.