Lunch for Libraries with Jesmyn Ward

This event: || Lunch for Libraries is Madison Public Library Foundation’s signature spring fundraising event. Your ticket supports Wisconsin Book Festival’s free, year-round programs that bring readers and authors together.

This year’s featured speaker will be Jesmyn Ward, two-time National Book Award–winning author of On Witness and Respair.

In this powerful collection of essays and speeches, Ward blends personal history, literary reflection, and social witness to explore grief, resilience, Black motherhood, and the enduring power of storytelling in the face of personal and collective loss. Ward will reflect on the writers and experiences that have shaped her voice, as well as the role of literature as both testimony and survival.

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship, the Strauss Living Prize, and the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. She has won the National Book Award for Fiction twice—for Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing Her memoir Men We Reaped was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and received the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. Ward is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi. || $150 for individual tickets, $200 for individual tickets with Wisconsin Book Festival membership