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Local author and professor Jessica Hendry Nelson brings us her touching new memoir, winner of the 2023 AWP Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Jessica will be in conversation with Kayleigh Hughes in the store at Fountain!
Joy Rides through the Tunnel of Grief is a fresh and ferocious memoir-in-essays that maps the boundaries of love, language, and creative urgency. Fluidly navigating through past, present, and future, Nelson asks: Where does her desire to have a child come from? How does wonder charge and change a life? Are the imperatives to make art and to make a child born from the same searching place? Are they both masked and misguided attempts to thwart death? Nelson investigates the tremulous makings and unmakings of our most intense and fragile bonds—family, friends, lovers—with searing insight, humor, and tenderness.
About the Authors:
Jessica Hendry Nelson is the author of the memoir If Only You People Could Follow Directions as well as Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writers' Guide and Anthology with coauthor Sean Prentiss. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Tin House, the Threepenny Review, North American Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere. She teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and in the MFA Program at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. She lives in Richmond, Virginia. Connect with Jessica online at http://jessicahnelson.com/.
Kayleigh Hughes is a writer from Columbus, Ohio. She has an MFA in creative writing from VCU and a BA in English from UT Austin. Her literary work has appeared in Northwest Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Catapult, and The Establishment, while her journalism and criticism have appeared in The Austin American-Statesman, Pitchfork, Consequence of Sound, Paste, Loser City, and others. Learn more about her at http://www.kayleighhughes.com/.
