Jesmyn Ward Lecture

Acclaimed Author Jesmyn Ward to Visit Smith College for Lecture on “Hauntings” in Literature

(NORTHAMPTON, Mass. – February 2, 2026) Two-time National Book Award Winner Jesmyn Ward, hailed as the standout writer of her generation, will visit Smith College on Wednesday, March 25, to deliver a lecture exploring the theme of haunting in her writing practice and published work. Her talk, inspired by the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute’s 2025–26 project Hauntings, will take place at 5 p.m. in Theatre 14, Mendenhall Center for the Performing Arts. 

The event is free and open to the public. Seating is limited; tickets are required online at the Smith College box office or by emailing boxoffice@smith.edu.

“My mama knew the world was sopping with spirit, that you didn’t need to go to heaven or hell to witness it; she knew it was all here. And now I know, too.”
–Jesmyn Ward, Let Us Descend

The Kahn Institute’s yearlong project—organized by Alex Callender, associate professor of art, and Jennifer DeClue, associate professor of the study of women, gender and sexuality—explores haunting as a mechanism to draw us into dialogue with unresolved pasts. These pasts could be personal and familial histories personified in the haunted house, the ghosts of academic disciplines that perpetuate inequalities, or the legacies of spectral forms of governance where loss or violence can haunt public imaginations. 

Following her lecture, Ward will join DeClue in a conversation. 

Explaining why she wanted to bring Ward to Smith, DeClue shares, “Her stories register the unspoken machinations of Black life, struggle, and magic that I experienced as a child in St. Louis, Missouri. Her writing attends to the supernatural and describes, with such tenderness, the everyday reality of Black and poor Southern life.”

Books will be available for purchase at the event, with sales provided by Broadside Bookshop. For disability access information or accommodation requests, email kahninstitute@smith.edu. To request a sign language interpreter, email arc@smith.edu at least two weeks before the event.

Jesmyn Ward’s “fearless and toughly lyrical” voice in her novels, memoir, and nonfiction has earned her a MacArthur Fellowship and two National Book Awards. In 2024, Men We Reaped, Salvage the Bones, and Sing, Unburied, Sing were named among The New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Her most recent novel, Let Us Descend, is her first historical novel, becoming an instant New York Times bestseller and praised by NPR as “the literary equivalent of an open wound from which poetry pours.”

Ward is a professor of English and the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Tulane University. 

Jesmyn Ward’s visit is sponsored by the Louise W. and Edmund J. Kahn Liberal Arts Institute, the Program for the Study of Women, Gender & Sexuality, the Provost’s office, and the Departments of Africana Studies, American Studies, and English Language and Literature.

The Louise W. and Edmund J. Kahn Liberal Arts Institute supports collaborative research among Smith faculty, staff, and students, Five College faculty, and visiting scholars—all without regard to the traditional boundaries of departments, programs, and academic divisions. Each year, the institute supports long- and short-term projects proposed, planned, and organized by Smith College faculty. Kahn fellows work together on broad, interdisciplinary topics investigated in depth over an academic year or semester.

The Smith College Program for the Study of Women, Gender & Sexuality examines gender, race, class, and sexuality as important and simultaneous aspects of social worlds and human lives. Students in this program examine the construction and operation of power relations, social inequalities, and resistances to them in national, transnational, cultural, historical, and political contexts. As an interdisciplinary endeavor, the program looks at how different academic disciplines view the operation of gender in the labor market, the family, political systems, and cultural production. The study of women and gender is also joined to an understanding of the forms of activism around the globe.