Moonrise Over New Jessup

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About the book:

Winner of the 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and Finalist for the Center For Fiction First Novel Prize

It's 1957, and after leaving the only home she has ever known, Alice Young steps off the bus into all-Black New Jessup, where residents have largely rejected integration as the means for Black social advancement. Instead, they seek to maintain, and fortify, the community they cherish on their "side of the woods." In this place, Alice falls in love with Raymond Campbell, whose clandestine organizing activities challenge New Jessup's longstanding status quo and could lead to the young couple's expulsion--or worse--from the home they each hold dear. As they marry and raise children together, Alice must find a way to balance her undying support for Raymond's underground work with her desire to protect New Jessup from the rising pressure of upheaval from inside, and outside, their side of town.

Based on the history of the many Black towns and settlements established across the country, Jamila Minnicks's heartfelt and riveting debut is both a timely examination of the opposing viewpoints that attended desegregation in America and a celebration of Black joy.

About the author:

Jamila Minnicks’ novel Moonrise Over New Jessup (Algonquin Books, 2023), won the 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, was a finalist for the 2023 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was longlisted the 2023 Crook’s Corner Book Prize. Her short stories and essays are published, or forthcoming, in Ploughshares, The Sun, CRAFT, Catapult, Blackbird, The Write Launch, and elsewhere. Jamila’s work has been supported by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Jamila is a graduate of the University of Michigan, the Howard University School of Law, and the Georgetown University Law Center. She lives in Washington, DC.