Jacinda Townsend

Jacinda Townsend teaches creative writing and explores movement, friendship, and the pressures surrounding Black women’s lives in her fiction. W. W. Norton published her debut novel, Saint Monkey, in 2014. Set chiefly in eastern Kentucky during the 1950s, the book follows Audrey Martin and Caroline Wallace, known as Pookie, whose intense friendship changes as their ambitions pull them toward different futures. Audrey’s talent as a pianist eventually carries her to Harlem and the jazz world, while Caroline remains closely tied to their Kentucky community. Townsend structures the novel through both women’s perspectives, allowing affection, rivalry, distance, and memory to reshape the same shared history. Saint Monkey received the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the Society of American Historians’ James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction. Townsend later published Mother Country, extending her interest in family, belonging, and lives divided across places. Her debut remains distinguished by its musical current and its close attention to a friendship tested by opportunity.