Literary Arts

Jacinda Townsend

Vartan Gregorian Assistant Professor of Literary Arts

Biography

 

Fall 2026

On leave

Spring 2027

LITR 2010A, Graduate Fiction

Jacinda Townsend is the author of Trigger Warning (Graywolf, 2025) and Mother Country (Graywolf, 2022), winner of the 2023 Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Townsend's first novel, Saint Monkey (Norton, 2014), winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction, was an Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. A former broadcast journalist and antitrust lawyer, Townsend has written nonfiction for Al Jazeera and The White Review.