Join us for a special evening with two-time National Book Award Winner Jesmyn Ward in conversation with Traci Thomas, creator and host of the critically-acclaimed literary podcast The Stacks. Ward returns to the ALOUD stage to discuss her raw, transcendent novel Let Us Descend. Her work has garnered considerable attention both with critics and audiences alike and Let Us Descend is no exception—instantly a New York Times bestseller, chosen as an Oprah Winfrey Book Club book, and named one of the best books of 2023 by The New Yorker, Washington Post, and Vanity Fair, among others.
Let Us Descend describes a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. A journey that is as beautifully rendered as it is heart wrenching, the novel is “[t]he literary equivalent of an open wound from which poetry pours.”—National Public Radio
