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Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series
278. Jesmyn Ward with Ijeoma Oluo: Let Us Descend
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Jesmyn Ward, the two-time National Book Award winner, has returned with a new novel about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War. Let Us Descend, an Oprah's Book Club pick, describes a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. In Let Us Descend (the title inspired by a line in Dante's Inferno ) the protagonist Annis is sold by her father, a white slaveowner. In the face of unspeakable circumstances on her way south, Annis seeks comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. She soon opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits:…