Jacinda Townsend grew up in Kentucky and took her first creative writing classes as an undergraduate at Harvard; after doing time as a broadcast journalist and then an antitrust lawyer, Jacinda got her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop before going on to spend a year as a Fulbright fellow. During her Fulbright year, she first witnessed modern-day slavery: this witness inspired the research that eventually would become her novel Mother Country, the 2022 winner of the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Jacinda is also the author of Saint Monkey, which is set in 1950’s Eastern Kentucky and is a love letter to a Black community that has all but disappeared. In 2015, Saint Monkey won both the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize: Saint Monkey was also the 2015 Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Jacinda recently published her third novel, Trigger Warning, which is told in the alternating voices of Ruth Hurley, who changes her identity and moves across the country after her father is killed by police in the late eighties, and Myron Hurley, her soon-to-be-ex-husband, who spends the novel uncovering the truth about his wife. Jacinda is a former elected official who teaches in the MFA program at Brown University, and is mom to two children who amaze her daily.