Southcentral Kentucky native and Fulbright Fellow Jacinda Townsend recently won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence for her novel Mother Country (Graywolf Press 2022), which explores themes of motherhood and slavery in Mauritania. Townsend also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka prize for best fiction written by a woman and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for best historical fiction for her previous novel Saint Monkey (Norton 2015). Her current project is a novel, James Loves Ruth –excerpts of which were published in Auburn Avenue, Copper Nickel, Still, and Transition. Jacinda Townsend is the Helen Zell visiting Professor in Fiction at the University of Michigan, and is mom to two magnificent children who amaze her daily.