Jesmyn Ward is the author of the novel, Let Us Descend (Scribner’s), now available in paperback.

Let Us Descend describes a journey by an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War. The reader is taken from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation.

This journey is as beautifully rendered as it is heart wrenching, “[t]he literary equivalent of an open wound from which poetry pours” (NPR).

The book was an Oprah’s Book Club Pick, an instant New York Times bestseller and winner of the 2024 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction.

Let Us Descend was named one of the best books of 2023 by The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, The Boston Globe, Time, The New Yorker, among others.

Among Ward’s numerous accolades: the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, the Strauss Living Prize, and the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.

She is the historic winner—first woman and first Black American—of two National Book Awards for Fiction (Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Salvage the Bones (2011).

She is also the author of the novel, Where the Line Bleeds.

Her memoir, Men We Reaped, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times.

Ward is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.

Songwriter, singer and guitarist Alex McMurray has been writing and performing solo and with numerous bands in New Orleans since 1989.

His songs are as eclectic as the Crescent City: soulful, rootsy, some flirting with Caribbean grooves, gospel, smoky R&B, and the dusty country music of the American Southwest.

His albums include his latest, The Recent Future.

His previous albums include, Lucky One and Road Songs. 

During the Covid-19 pandemic he hosted the weekly “Fireside Chat” webcast every Tuesday night for over 100 straight weeks under his nom de covid, “Mister Tuesday Night.”

Cable television fans remember his stint on the HBO series, Treme, in which he memorably played himself.

Ally Durr is a singer songwriter from Jackson, MS. Her latest releases include the singles What You Livin For and Keep Fighting, which is included on the soundtrack of the film, I’m From You.

Durr’s soulful voice reflects her influences of soul, jazz, gospel, hip hop and R&B.

For her Ocean Springs appearance, Ally will be backed by our own Yalobushwhackers.