‘Moonrise Over New Jessup’ author Jamila Minnicks speaks at Civil Rights Heritage Center

SOUTH BEND — The University of Notre Dame’s Initiative on Race and Resilience presents “An Evening with Jamila Minnicks ” at 6 p.m. April 11 at the IU South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center, 1040 W. Washington St.

Minnicks’ “Moonrise Over New Jessup” (Algonquin Books, 2023) won the 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.

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In the novel, Alice Young steps off the bus in 1957 into the all-Black town of New Jessup, Ala., where residents have largely rejected integration as the means for Black social advancement, seeking instead to maintain, and fortify, their “side of the woods.”

What follows is a challenge of the relationship between, as the New York Times Book Review puts it, “the fight for equal rights and the fight for integration.”

Her short story “Politics of Distraction” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. In 2022, she was awarded a Tennessee Williams scholarship for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and she also earned a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

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Minnicks is a graduate of the University of Michigan, the Howard University School of Law and the Georgetown University Law Center. She lives in Washington, D.C.

This event is in-person only.

For more information, call 574-307-6135 or visit crhc.iusb.edu.

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: PEN winner Jamila Minnicks speaks at Civil Rights Heritage Center