Jacinda Townsend is the author of Mother Country (Graywolf, 2022), winner of the 2023 Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Mother Country is also short listed for both the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards. Townsend's first novel, Saint Monkey (Norton, 2014), won both the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction, and was the 2015 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.
