§Author· 3 books
Jesmyn Ward
Set in rural coastal Mississippi, contemporary fiction depicting working-class Black families facing environmental disasters, systemic poverty, and personal loss has reshaped Southern literature. Jesmyn Ward established her reputation through novels and creative nonfiction grounded in the Gulf Coast region, becoming the first woman and first Black American author to win the National Book Award for Fiction twice. Her second novel, Salvage the Bones, captures twelve days surrounding Hurricane Katrina through the eyes of a pregnant teenager in a Mississippi town, while Sing, Unburied, Sing weaves a road narrative across Mississippi with ghost stories and intergenerational trauma.
Beyond her fiction, Ward writes candid memoirs and essays addressing grief, systemic racism, and community resilience in the American South. Her memoir, Men We Reaped: A Memoir, examines the deaths of five young Black men in her hometown, including her younger brother, combining intimate family history with social analysis.
Career & Background
Ward was born on April 1, 1977, and grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi, along the Gulf Coast. She attended Stanford University, earning a Bachelor of Arts in 1999 and a Master of Arts in 2000, followed by a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan in 2005. Shortly after her graduation from Michigan, Hurricane Katrina flooded her family home in Mississippi. Ward held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University from 2008 to 2010 and served as the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. In 2014, she joined the faculty at Tulane University, where she became a professor of English and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017.
Writing Style & Themes
Ward's writing combines lyrical prose with an authentic voice, frequently set in the fictional coastal Mississippi town of Bois Sauvage or real Gulf Coast communities. Her narratives center on marginalized Black communities, exploring familial love, survival, addiction, incarceration, and the enduring impacts of poverty and racism. Through poetic description and intense emotional realism, her work incorporates elements of folklore, history, and haunting spiritual presence to examine how past hardships continue to shape present lives.
Major Works
- Salvage the Bones — Published in 2011, this National Book Award-winning novel follows Esch, a pregnant fourteen-year-old girl, and her family in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, as they prepare for and survive Hurricane Katrina.
- Sing, Unburied, Sing — Winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction, this novel centers on a family road trip to a Mississippi state penitentiary, blending themes of addiction, racism, and ghost narratives.
- Men We Reaped: A Memoir — This 2013 memoir and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist chronicles the lives and early deaths of five young Black men in Ward's community, including her brother Joshua.
§All Books
Sing, Unburied, Sing
Jesmyn Ward, 2017
185 ratings
Salvage the Bones
Jesmyn Ward, 2011
76 ratings
Men We Reaped: A Memoir
Jesmyn Ward, 2013
36 ratings