Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward (born April 1, 1977, Oakland, California, U.S.) is one of the most acclaimed writers of the 21st century, publishing novels and nonfiction works that explore the lives of poor African Americans living in coastal Mississippi, all written in an authentic voice combined with lyrical prose. She is the first woman and the first Black American novelist to have won the National Book Award for fiction twice (in 2011 and 2017).

Childhood and education

Ward’s parents were from the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Her father’s family fled to the San Francisco Bay Area in California after Hurricane Camille ravaged the southeastern United States in 1969. Later, her mother moved from the South to Los Angeles to attend college, but she left after one semester to move to Oakland to be closer to Ward’s father. The eldest of four children, Ward was born in Oakland, but her family moved back to Mississippi—first to Pass Christian, then to DeLisle—in 1980, when she was three years old. Her father worked occasional factory jobs and raised pit bulls that he trained to fight. He left the family while Ward was a child, after which her mother cleaned houses to support the family.

Ward read a great deal in her childhood. A few of her favorite books growing up were Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh, Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell, and Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George. When Ward was in middle school, her mother’s employer, a wealthy lawyer, offered to pay Jesmyn’s tuition at a small private Episcopal school. She attended the school for the rest of her secondary education and was the only Black student. After graduating, she attended Stanford University, where she completed a bachelor’s degree in English in 1999 and a master’s degree in media studies and communication in 2000.

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Literary career

Ward moved back to Mississippi after earning her master’s. Only a few months later, in October 2000, her 19-year-old brother, Joshua, was killed by a drunk driver. Rather than being charged with manslaughter, the driver was charged with leaving the scene of an accident and received a light sentence. Ward later said that the painful experience drove her to become a writer. She lived and worked for a short time in New York City, then enrolled in the University of Michigan’s Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) program in 2003. She returned home to DeLisle in 2005; shortly thereafter Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and flooded and destroyed much of her hometown.

Ward spent the next three years revising and submitting her M.F.A. thesis to publishers while working as a college instructor in Mississippi. After many rejections of her manuscript, during which she considered giving up writing and entering a nursing program, she found a publisher for her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds (2008). It tells the story of twin brothers who graduate from high school only to face a lack of opportunities for young Black men in their hometown, the fictional Bois Sauvage, which Ward based on DeLisle. The book received praise for its use of dialect, lush prose, and complex portrayal of family bonds.

Ward’s second novel, Salvage the Bones (2011), also takes place in Bois Sauvage. It centers on a pregnant teenage girl living with her father and brothers as they prepare for the landfall of Hurricane Katrina. The novel won the National Book Award for fiction, which came as a surprise to many in the publishing world because Ward was still relatively unknown. Two years later, while teaching creative writing at the University of South Alabama, Ward published a memoir, Men We Reaped. The book focuses on a four-year period marked by the deaths of her brother and four other young men she knew from her home community. Acclaimed for its searingly personal portraits of young Black men whose lives were cut short, the memoir was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

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In 2014 Ward joined the faculty of Tulane University in New Orleans and taught creative writing. In 2016 she served as editor of The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race. Taking its inspiration from American author James Baldwin and his 1963 essay collection, The Fire Next Time, Ward’s book features essays and poems by some of the most prominent contemporary Black writers, including Edwidge Danticat, Mitchell S. Jackson, Kiese Laymon, Claudia Rankine, Clint Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Isabel Wilkerson, and Kevin Young. The book’s essays explore topics such as the mass shooting in 2015 of Black churchgoers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and the music and influence of the Southern rap group OutKast.

Ward’s third novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, was published in 2017. Like her first two novels, it follows a poor Black family in Bois Sauvage, but, unlike its predecessors, it is narrated through three perspectives and deals with Southern history, particularly slavery, in a more direct way. It also has a supernatural element, wherein several ghosts haunt the characters. Sing, Unburied, Sing won Ward her second National Book Award for fiction. The same year, she received a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation.

In 2018 Ward gave a stirring commencement speech at Tulane that was published as an illustrated book, Navigate Your Stars, in 2020. In January that year, Ward’s husband, Brandon R. Miller, died at age 33 as the COVID-19 pandemic was starting to sweep the United States. The official cause of death was acute respiratory distress syndrome. Ward wrote about his death and the experience of being left alone to raise their children in an essay for Vanity Fair published later that year.

(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Britannica essay on “Monuments of Hope.”)

In 2022 Ward was named the winner of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction; at the time she was the youngest winner to be awarded the prize. The following year she published her fourth novel, Let Us Descend, its title being an allusion to the descent into hell in Dante’s Inferno. Taking place in the years before the American Civil War, it tells the story of a girl named Annis who is sold by the white enslaver who fathered her and sent to live on a sugar plantation in Louisiana.

Literary comparisons

As a fiction writer, Ward is often compared to the American novelists William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, and her richly imagined Bois Sauvage is likened to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, which was drawn from Faulkner’s various hometowns in Mississippi. But the writer Kiese Laymon, who is also a Mississippian, has challenged those who frame her work as being merely the heir of Faulkner’s. In a 2023 profile of Ward, he told The New York Times, “She’s not following Faulkner. Jesmyn is competing with him.”