Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward was born in 1977 in DeLisle, Mississippi, a small community on the Gulf Coast that she has called Bois Sauvage in her fiction and that anchors much of her imaginative world. She grew up in a working-class Black family in rural Mississippi, witnessed the economic disinvestment and racial violence that shaped her community, and lost her brother Joshua to a drunk driver in 2000—a death she has written about directly in her memoir and that haunts all her fiction. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and her MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan as well, and has taught at Tulane University and the University of Mississippi.
Ward’s first novel, Where the Line Bleeds (2008), introduced the community and the concerns that would run through all her work: the intergenerational poverty and violence of the rural Black South, the pull of family and place, the ways that structural racism destroys lives that might otherwise flourish. Her second novel, Salvage the Bones (2011), told the story of a poor Black family in rural Mississippi in the twelve days surrounding Hurricane Katrina, centering a teenage girl named Esch who is secretly pregnant and drawing on classical mythology—particularly the myth of Medea—to give mythic weight to contemporary catastrophe. The novel won the National Book Award for Fiction.
Her third novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), won a second National Book Award—making Ward only the second writer in history to win the award twice in the fiction category—and was widely celebrated as a masterpiece of contemporary American literature. The book followed a Black family on a road trip across Mississippi, weaving together the present-day story of Jojo, a thirteen-year-old boy, with the ghost of Richie, a Black teenager who died at the infamous Parchman Farm prison in the 1940s. Drawing on the traditions of Southern Gothic and magical realism, the novel made Mississippi’s history of racial violence literally haunt its present, arguing that the dead cannot rest until the living reckon honestly with how they died.
Her memoir, Men We Reaped (2013), told the story of five young Black men from her community who died within four years of each other, including her brother, weaving their stories together with an account of her own coming-of-age and the structural forces—poverty, racism, the drug trade, the absence of opportunity—that made their deaths feel, as she put it, not random but inevitable.
Jesmyn Ward is one of the most honored and widely read novelists of her generation, and her work has established the rural Black South as one of the essential landscapes of contemporary American literature. Her fiction combines the local and the mythic, the intimate and the political, in a way that insists on the full humanity and the full tragedy of people whose lives American culture has systematically rendered invisible.
