Jesmyn Ward to Speak at Annual Eudora Welty Lecture

On Wednesday, October 16 at 7:30 pm the Folger Shakespeare Library's
O.B. Hardison Poetry Series presents the Eudora Welty Lecture with best-selling author Jesmyn Ward at the National Press Club. Sponsored by the Eudora Welty Foundation, this annual lecture celebrates creative origins in the spirit of Welty's treasured One Writer's Beginnings.

Tickets for this event are $25 and can be purchased at the Folger Box Office at (202) 544-7077 or by visiting www.folger.edu/poetry.

Jesmyn Ward is a MacArthur Genius and two-time National Book Award winner. In 2017, she became the first woman and first person of color to win the National Book Award twice-joining the ranks of William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Philip Roth, and John Updike.

Her writing encompasses fiction, nonfiction, and memoir. Ward's Salvage the Bones was the winner of the 2011 National Book Award and is a troubling but ultimately empowering tale of familial bonds set amid the chaos of the hurricane. Her memoir, Men We Reaped, deals with the loss of five young men in her life-to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that follows people who live in poverty. In 2016, Ward edited the critically acclaimed anthology The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, a New York Times bestseller. Her newest novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, won the 2017 National Book Award.

Ward is an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University. Previous Welty Lectures were delivered by Salman Rushdie in 2016, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in 2017, and Richard Ford in 2018.