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Jesmyn Ward

Biography

Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, the Strauss Living Prize, and the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. She is the historic winner --- first woman and first Black American --- of two National Book Awards for Fiction for SING, UNBURIED, SING (2017) and SALVAGE THE BONES (2011). She is also the author of the novels WHERE THE LINE BLEEDS and LET US DESCEND, as well as the memoir MEN WE REAPED, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.

Jesmyn Ward

Books by Jesmyn Ward

Let Us Descend
by Jesmyn Ward - Fiction, Historical Fiction

From Jesmyn Ward --- the two-time National Book Award winner, youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction, and MacArthur Fellow --- comes a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic, about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War.

Sing, Unburied, Sing
by Jesmyn Ward - Fiction

Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, THE ODYSSEY and the Old Testament, Jesmyn Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi’s past and present that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle.

Men We Reaped: A Memoir
by Jesmyn Ward - Nonfiction

In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life --- to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write about the experience of living through all the dying, she realized the truth --- and it took her breath away.

Salvage the Bones
by Jesmyn Ward - African American Interest, Fiction

A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. But Esch has her own problems.