The Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins University is excited to announce that fiction writer Jacinda Townsend will serve as the Spring 2025 Louis D. Rubin Jr. Writer-in-Residence.
Jacinda Townsend is the author of Trigger Warning (Graywolf, 2026) and Mother Country (Graywolf, 2022), winner of the 2023 Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Townsend’s first novel, Saint Monkey (Norton, 2014), winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction, was an Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. A former broadcast journalist and antitrust lawyer, Townsend has written nonfiction for Al Jazeera and The White Review.
Jacinda Townsend will also be teaching English 351 – Curatorial Considerations: Writing Magical Realism
This class will give your forays into the unusual the airtime and love they deserve, and nurture these evolutions toward the realms of absurdism, fabulism and magical realism. We will discuss the alteration of realism as a way of putting the narrative at hand to its highest use. We’ll also examine music and artwork that pushes the boundaries of the “real” in terms of form. While not a 1:1 correlation in terms of the departures we make in literature, they’re worth considering as interdisciplinary paradigms that push the envelope. We’ll read Lesley Nneka Arima, Italo Calvino, Helen Oyeyemi and Karen Russell, among others.
Hollins MFA 