Indiana University’s Jacinda Townsend Wins Award for Her First Novel

Jacinda Townsend, an associate professor of English at Indiana University, has been selected as the recipient of the 2015 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction from the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Rochester.

Professor Townsend will be honored and receive a $7,500 prize on October 27 at the University of Rochester for her book Saint Monkey (W.W. Norton, 2014). The book chronicles the lives of two African American girls growing up in Eastern Kentucky during the civil rights era.

Professor Townsend is a 1992 graduate of Harvard University. She earned a law degree at Duke University and a master of fine arts degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.