In partnership with the Face to Face Speaker Forum, the Program for Leadership and Character will welcome award-winning writer Jesmyn Ward for a keynote conversation at 6:00pm on Thursday, December 5th in Wait Chapel to launch the conference, “Educating Character Across Differences,” December 5-7, 2024 on the WFU Campus.
In the lead-up to Ward’s appearance, the WFU Humanities Institute is partnering with the Program for Leadership and Character to host three reading groups on three different Jesmyn Ward texts from 4:30-6:00pm on December 2nd and 3rd in Tribble Hall.
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER
Reading Group Details
Let Us Descend, Facilitated by Dr. Julia Jordan-Zachery
Monday, December 2nd, 4:30-6:00pm, A104 Tribble Hall
From Simon and Schuster:
“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’ (NPR).
Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits: of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Annis leads readers through the descent, hers is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation.”
Men We Reaped, Facilitated by Dr. Shanna Benjamin
Monday, December 2nd, 4:30-6:00pm, A302 Tribble Hall
From Goodreads:
“In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five men in her life, to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: why? And as she began to write about the experience of living through all the dying, she realized the truth–and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships. Jesmyn says the answer was so obvious she felt stupid for not seeing it. But it nagged at her until she knew she had to write about her community, to write their stories and her own.
Jesmyn grew up in poverty in rural Mississippi. She writes powerfully about the pressures this brings, on the men who can do no right and the women who stand in for family in a society where the men are often absent. She bravely tells her story, revisiting the agonizing losses of her only brother and her friends. As the sole member of her family to leave home and pursue high education, she writes about this parallel American universe with the objectivity distance provides and the intimacy of utter familiarity.”
Salvage the Bones, Facilitated by Dr. Rian Bowie
Tuesday, December 3rd, 4:30-6:00pm, A104 Tribble Hall
From Goodreads:
“A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch’s father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn’t show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn’t much to save. Lately, Esch can’t keep down what food she gets; she’s fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull’s new litter, dying one by one in the dirt, while brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child’s play and short on parenting. As the twelve days that comprise the novel’s framework yield to the final day and Hurricane Katrina, the unforgettable family at the novel’s heart—motherless children sacrificing for each other as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce—pulls itself up to struggle for another day. A wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.”
Faculty and students who wish to join a reading group can register for one of the groups below and receive a free copy of their respective book.