Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward was born in 1977 in Mississippi, a state whose presence runs through her career as a novelist and writer. A citizen of the United States, Ward pursued her education at Stanford University and the University of Michigan, building the scholarly and literary foundations that would carry her into both fiction and academic life.
Ward's career as a novelist brought her sustained recognition within American letters. Her second novel, Salvage the Bones, earned her the National Book Award for Fiction in 2011, marking a significant milestone in her work. She returned to that same prize with Sing, Unburied, Sing, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2017, making her one of the few writers to receive that distinction twice. Beyond those two awards, Ward received the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. She was also named to Time 100 and received a fellowship through the MacArthur Fellows Program, a grant awarded to individuals across a range of fields.
Alongside her writing, Ward has maintained a career in higher education. She serves as a professor of English at Tulane University, where she also holds the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities. This dual role, as both a practicing novelist and a university teacher, has placed her within the institutional life of American literary culture while keeping her connected to the academic study of the humanities.
Ward continues her work as a novelist and educator, currently affiliated with Tulane University as a professor of English and holder of the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities. Her two National Book Awards for Fiction — won six years apart for Salvage the Bones in 2011 and Sing, Unburied, Sing in 2017 — remain the most formally documented markers of her standing in American fiction.
Quotes by Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward's insights on:
In the past, I travelled with 'The Hero and the Crown' by Robin McKinley: I suffer from a fear of flying, and I felt a bit safer knowing I carried the book and characters with me.
When I was a teenager, I was the only black girl at a small, private Episcopal school, where my tuition was paid by the family my mother worked for. It was hard being the only one, and I faced a fair amount of racist and classist bullying there.
One of the most important things that I want for my kids is I want them to live. You know, I want them to live to see 21 and beyond.
As an artist, I feel a certain responsibility to write about difficult subject matter.
As a reader, sometimes, I just want to not think. You know, I want to read something that is purely enjoyable: that is, like, escapist.
I don't really base any of my characters on specific people that I know, although my characters are informed by the kind of people who live in my community.
With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.
Faulkner's characters, too, were uneducated. They were deprived, but they were allowed to have very rich inner lives. I want to advocate for that, for inner lives that are much more complicated and more poetic than we think.
The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.
