Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Names and faces
■ It’s official for Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas.
The two on Saturday announced on their respective Instagram accounts they are engaged. Each posted the same picture, a close-up of them gazing lovingly at each other, an engagement ring on Chopra’s finger. The two are in India with both of their families. “Taken … With all my heart and soul,” Chopra wrote. On Jonas’ page, he wrote, “Future Mrs. Jonas. My heart. My love.” The 25-yearold Jonas and 36-year-old Chopra had reportedly decided in July to get married after dating for two months. Jonas gained fame as a member of the Jonas Brothers musical group and is now a solo artist and actor. Chopra starred in the ABC television drama
Quantico. She is a former Miss World winner. ■ National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward told a homestate audience in Mississippi on Saturday that she’s working on two books. One is a New Orleans-based story about the slave trade. The other is a young adult novel about an African-American girl with supernatural powers. Ward and another acclaimed author, Salman Rushdie, attracted large audiences at the fourth Mississippi Book Festival. During sessions inside the state Capitol and at a church nearby, dozens of authors spoke on a wide range of topics, including food, sports, politics and civil rights history. Ward returned home years ago to live and write in the small community of DeLisle on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where her family has had roots for generations. The two novels for which she won the National Book Award, Salvage the Bones in 2011 and Sing, Unburied, Sing in 2017, are set among the bayous and sturdy live oaks of the region. Sing, Unburied, Sing, is centered on a family’s odyssey to pick up a relative from prison. In writing the novel, Ward said she did research and learned that, decades ago, boys as young as 12 or 13 years old were sent to the notorious Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman for minor offenses. “The pain that they had suffered had basically been erased,” she said. She said a “school-to-prison pipeline” echoes that situation today. Ward teaches creative writing at Tulane University in New Orleans. She said she came upon the idea of writing about the slave trade while driving and listening to a public radio report about the city’s tricentennial. A historian said there were once dozens of “slave pens” in New Orleans where black people were held until being sold. “I felt like all the misery that the enslaved people had endured … that had all been erased in some way,” Ward said. “And so I thought, ‘I have to write something about this.’”