Jamila Minnicks
The featured writer at the April 21 “Sunday with Friends” event is Jamila Minnicks whose debut novel “Moonrise Over New Jessup” won the latest PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, sponsored by Barbara Kingsolver. The event will be at 3 p.m. at the Washington County Public Library, Abingdon, Virginia.
In the novel, it is 1957, and after leaving the only home she has ever known, Alice Young steps off the bus into all-Black New Jessup, where residents have largely rejected integration as the means for Black social advancement. Instead, they seek to maintain and fortify the community they cherish on their “side of the woods.”
In this place, Alice falls in love with Raymond Campbell, whose clandestine organizing activities challenge New Jessup’s longstanding status quo and could lead to the young couple’s expulsion—or worse—from the home they both hold dear. As they marry and raise children together, Alice must find a way to balance her undying support for his underground work with her desire to protect New Jessup from the rising pressure of upheaval from inside and outside their side of town.
Kingsolver, in awarding the prize, said, “With compelling characters and a heart-pounding plot, Jamilia Minnicks pulled me into pages of history I’d never turned before.”
Minnicks is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the Howard University School of Law. She lives in Washington, D.C.
The series is sponsored by the Friends of the Washington County Public Library, a volunteer, non-profit organization whose purpose is to help strengthen the resources of the library and to make it a dynamic force in the community.
There will be refreshments as well as book sales and signings after the events. For more information, contact the event’s coordinator, Ben Jennings, at ben.h.jennings@gmail.com.
