Award-winning novelist to discuss oral traditions in literature at Tulane

Tulane professor Jesmyn Ward, a National Book Award-winning novelist, will give the Fourth Annual Distinguished Frey Lecture on storytelling and Southern oral traditions Thursday at the university. 

This lecture, which is sponsored by Tulane’s New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, will be at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 19, in the Freeman auditorium, room 205 in the Woldenberg Art Center on Tulane’s uptown campus.

This event is free and open to the public. After Ward speaks, there will be a reception and a book signing.

Ward is a Mississippi native whose work is heavily influenced by oral tradition and her time growing up in the South. The different themes of race, sex and poverty also play a role in her novels. Ward is the Paul and Debra Gibbons Professor of English at Tulane.

Her most recent work, Men We Reaped, received national attention. It is a memoir about the five men in her life that she lost due to struggles that come with living in poverty.