Hillary Jordan
Author of prize-winning novel Mudbound
“Hillary Jordan writes with the force of a Delta storm.” —Barbara Kingsolver
Hillary Jordan is a novelist whose authentic and earthy prose is expected to echo for years to come. Her debut novel Mudbound (Algonquin Books, 2008) received the 2006 Bellwether Prize for Fiction, a prize founded by Barbara Kingsolver to reward books of conscience, social responsibility, and literary merit, as well as the 2009 Alex Award from the American Library Association. Released to instant critical acclaim, Mudbound was the NAIBA (New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association) Fiction Book of the Year, a Borders Original Voices selection, a Book Sense pick, and one of twelve New Voices of 2008 chosen by Waterstone’s UK. It was called a “powerful firestorm of a first novel” by Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, and Publishers Weekly wrote that Mudbound “carries echoes of As I Lay Dying, hailing the book as “a superbly rendered depiction of the fury and terror wrought by racism.” Her next novel, Red, is forthcoming from Algonquin in 2011.
Jordan grew up in Texas and Oklahoma. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, and a BA in English and Political Science from Wellesley College. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals, including StoryQuarterly and The Carolina Quarterly. She lives in Tivoli, NY.
About MUDBOUND (2008)
“Jordan's tautly structured debut . . . confronts disturbing truths about America's past with a directness and a freshness of approach that recalls Alice Walker's The Color Purple.” —The London Times
In Jordan's prize-winning novel, prejudice takes many forms, both subtle and brutal. It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm—a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not—charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, has come home with the shine of a war hero. But no matter his bravery in defense of his country, he is still considered less than a man in the Jim Crow South. It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its inexorable conclusion. The men and women of each family relate their versions of events and we are drawn into their lives as they become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale. As Kingsolver says of Hillary Jordan, "Her characters walked straight out of 1940s Mississippi and into the part of my brain where sympathy and anger and love reside, leaving my heart racing. They are with me still."
