Jesmyn Ward Author Talk and Book Signing!

Join us at Baldwin & Co as we welcome bestselling author Jesmyn Ward! Hear her talk about her new novel and answer questions before finishing off the night with a book signing.

This is an exclusive ticketed event. Purchase your tickets here. Each ticket comes with your own personal copy of Jesmyn Ward's new book Let us Descend, which you can get signed at the end of the night.

From Jesmyn Ward—the two-time National Book Award winner, youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction, and MacArthur Fellow—comes a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic, about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War.

“‘Let us descend,’ the poet now began, ‘and enter this blind world.’” —Inferno, Dante Alighieri

"Language so beautifully evocative that the tale absolutely soars" - Pamela Klinger Horn, Valley Bookseller

Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is 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.

Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide through this hellscape. 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 Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation.

From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this miracle of a novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land—the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South. Let Us Descend is Jesmyn Ward’s most magnificent novel yet, a masterwork for the ages.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

1030 Elysian Fields Ave, 1030 Elysian Fields Avenue, New Orleans, United States