Photo by Dawn Whalen

An audience of 75 people—in person and on Zoom—were on hand to listen to

Robert Jones Jr. deliver the Brendan Gill lecture, the inaugural event of last month’s Haystack Book Festival. Jones read from his critically acclaimed first novel, The Prophets, and talked about his background and the life experiences that led him to write the novel. The Prophets, about the love between two enslaved men on a Mississippi cotton plantation, was recently named a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction. A recording of Jones’s entertaining and inspirational lecture can be found on the Norfolk Foundation Hub website.