2022 winner Jacinda Townsend

Jacinda Townsend's sophomore novel, Mother Country, has won the $15,000 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, which is presented by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation. The award is given to honor the late Ernest Gaines, a Louisiana native whose stories gave voice to African Americans in rural areas. Read the release.

“[Mr. Gaines’s] A Lesson Before Dying was one of the books that most taught me how to weave searing social justice with the pleasure of storytelling, so it is a special honor to be part of this long tradition of excellence in African-American literature,” stated Townsend.

Townsend is also the author of Saint Monkey, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. Saint Monkey was also the 2015 Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Townsend is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.