A person with glasses and long hair stands smiling with arms crossed in an alleyway between brick buildings. They wear a sheer red shawl over a black top. The buildings have windows and there is a blurry background.

Jacinda Townsend

Jacinda Townsend is the author of Trigger Warning (Graywolf, 2025) and Mother Country (Graywolf, 2022), winner of the 2023 Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Townsend’s first novel, Saint Monkey (Norton, 2014), won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction. A former broadcast journalist and elected official, Townsend has written nonfiction for Al Jazeera and The White Review.