With the help of her boyfriend and a bribed official, Shannon makes the fateful decision to adopt and raise the girl in Louisville, Kentucky. There, in the cobblestoned medina of Marrakech, she finds a toddler in a pink jacket whose face mirrors her own. She teaches creative writing at the University of California-Davis.Saddled with student loans, medical debt, and the sudden news of her infertility after a major car accident, Shannon, an African American woman, follows her boyfriend to Morocco in search of relief. She recently finished a second novel called Kif. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and went on to spend a year as a Fulbright fellow in Côte d’Ivoire. Saint Monkey was also the 2015 Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and was longlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize and shortlisted for the Crook’s Corner Book Prize.

Jacinda Townsend is the author of Saint Monkey (Norton, 2014), which is set in 1950’s Eastern Kentucky and won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction. Eliot Prize in 2009. His latest poetry collection is The Rose of Toulouse. His latest novel, Children of Paradise (HarperCollins, US Granta, UK), is inspired by the events at Jonestown. Poetry Book Society Choice, was shortlisted for the UK’s T.S. His radio play, Days and Nights in Bedlam, was broadcast by the BBC, along with several recent short stories.

His essays and poetry have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Guardian, Wasafiri, Callaloo, Best American Essays and other publications. His play, A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death, was produced at the Royal Court Theatre in London.

His first novel, The Longest Memory, won the Whitbread First Novel Award and was made into a film by Channel 4 (UK). He teaches in the MFA and African Studies programs at Virginia Tech. This event will take place on Tuesday, June 6, 2017, at 5:30pm in the Hitchcock Multipurpose Room at UNC-Chapel Hill.įred D’Aguiar is a poet, novelist, playwright, born in London of Guyanese parents and raised in Guyana. The Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop joins the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History to host a night of prose with the fiction leaders of the USA CCWW, Jacinda Townsend and Fred D’Aguiar.

Saint monkey by jacinda townsend