“My favorite novels light up my brain with things I hadn't considered before,” says Bellwether Prize founder Barbara Kingsolver. “With compelling characters and a heart-pounding plot, Jamila Minnicks pulled me into pages of history I'd never turned before.”

The Georgia Center for the Book welcomes debut author Jamila Minnicks for a discussion of her captivating novel, Moonrise Over New Jessup.

This event is free and open to the public. Registration is requested, but not required.

To pre-order a copy of Moonrise Over New Jessup from our partners at Brave + Kind Bookshop, (you can pick your copy up at the event, or afterward at the bookstore), please click the following link: PURCHASE

We are committed to a safe environment. For the safety of our invited speakers, staff, and all attendees, we respectfully request that masks be worn in the venue for the duration of the event. We are currently limiting the capacity of the Auditorium to promote social distancing, so registration is required. We encourage groups to sit together, but please only sit in the designated rows, and keep a respectful distance from other attendees.

Jamila Minnicks’ extraordinary debut novel, Moonrise Over New Jessup, winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, offers an insightful and fresh perspective of Black people flourishing in the American South, and doing what it takes to maintain independence “on their side of the woods” during the Civil Rights movement. Through Alice Young’s unforgettable voice, the fictional town of New Jessup is rendered as a loving, thriving, and complex community where social progress and self-reliance are intertwined.

About the Book

When Alice arrives in New Jessup in 1957 to start a new chapter in her life, the town is an autonomous, self-sufficient, and proud Black community where people are deeply skeptical of those lobbying for integration. She soon falls in love with Raymond Campbell, a town grandson and activist who has secretly courted a freedom group to assist his campaign to organize politically. Alice is fully committed to supporting Raymond’s underground efforts, but she also does everything in her power to protect New Jessup from the rising threat of upheaval. Representing women like Coretta Scott King, Myrlie Evers, and Betty Shabazz as young women, Alice inspires a man who moves a movement while she faces the very real and potential costs of holding together the world she loves.

Moonrise Over New Jessup grew out of Minnicks’ own concerns with the limited way that Black people and ideas about Black social progress have been historically portrayed. “Regardless of whether the segregation was de jure or de facto, from north to south and east to west, more than 1200 Black communities were founded between the late 18th and early 20th centuries. These were places where folks wished to maintain separation; where they believed that their main impediments to social advancement were the persistent diversion of tax money from the community, voter disenfranchisement, and both state-sanctioned, and extrajudicial, anti-Black violence,” she explains. “People in these communities founded them to provide safe spaces for us to live and work and love, not to abandon what had been built from the ground up by our foremothers and fathers, and that had existed for generations. Folks wanted to remain where they could ‘see it and be it,’ where their neighbors were professionals, their teachers, all Black, and where they were represented everywhere they looked.”

Moonrise Over New Jessup is a heartfelt and riveting novel that fully realizes the joys and struggles and resiliency of Black women and Black communities, and Minnicks offers a timely new way of thinking about our individual relationships to history.

To pre-order a copy of Moonrise Over New Jessup from our partners at Brave + Kind Bookshop, (you can pick your copy up at the event, or afterward at the bookstore), please click the following link: PURCHASE

About the Author

Jamila Minnicks' work has been published, or is forthcoming, in CRAFT literary magazine, Catapult, Blackbird, and The Write Launch, among others. Her piece, “Politics of Distraction,” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Jamila also earned a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and she was awarded a Tennessee Williams scholarship for the 2022 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan, the Howard University School of Law, and Georgetown University Law Center, and she lives in Washington, DC.

Photo: Samia Minnicks

About the Bookseller:

Brave + Kind Bookshop, Black owned and Mom operated, is a thoughtfully curated neighborhood bookshop that focuses on an intentional collection of inclusive children’s literature, and a few grown-up books, to help us all become better humans.

722 W. College Ave., Decatur, GA 30030

470. 440.5714

BraveandKindBooks.com