Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward (born April 1, 1977) is an American novelist and a professor of English at Tulane University, where she holds the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities. She won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction for her second novel Salvage the Bones, a story about familial love and community in facing Hurricane Katrina. She won the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction for her novel Sing, Unburied, Sing.

She is the only woman and only African American to win the National Book Award for Fiction twice. All of Ward's first three novels are set in the fictitious Mississippi town of Bois Sauvage. In her fourth novel, Let Us Descend, the main character Annis perhaps inhabits an earlier Bois Sauvage when she is taken shackled from the Carolina coast and put to work on a Mississippi sugar plantation near New Orleans.

Early life and education Jesmyn Ward was born in 1977 in Berkeley, California. When she was three, her parents returned to DeLisle, Mississippi, where they were originally from. She reportedly developed a love-hate relationship with her hometown after having been bullied by classmates both at public school and while attending a private school paid for by her mother's employer.

The first in her family to attend college, Ward earned a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1999, and a Master of Arts in media studies and communication in 2000, both at Stanford University. Ward chose to become a writer to honor the memory of her younger brother, who was killed by a drunk driver in October 2000, just after Ward had completed her master's degree. The driver responsible was not charged for her brother's death, only for leaving the scene of the car accident.

In 2005, Ward earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan.

Ward went on to work at the University of New Orleans, where her daily commute took her through the neighborhoods ravaged by the hurricane. Empathizing with the struggle of the survivors and coming to terms with her own experience during the storm, Ward was unable to write creatively for three years – the time it took her to find a publisher for her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds.

Career In 2008, just as Ward had decided to give up writing and enroll in a nursing program, Where the Line Bleeds was accepted by Agate Publishing. It was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Starting on the day twin protagonists Joshua and Christophe DeLisle graduate from high school, Where the Line Bleeds follows the brothers as their choices pull them in opposite directions.

From 2008 to 2010, Ward had a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. She was the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi for the 2010–2011 academic year.

In her second novel, Salvage the Bones, Ward homed in once more on the visceral bond between poor black siblings growing up on the Mississippi Coast. Ward uses vibrant language steeped in metaphors to illuminate the fundamental aspects of love, friendship, passion, and tenderness. Explaining her main character's fascination with the Greek mythological figure of Medea, Ward told Elizabeth Hoover of The Paris Review: "It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as 'other'. I wanted to align Esch with that classic text, with the universal figure of Medea, the antihero, to claim that tradition as part of my Western literary heritage. The stories I write are particular to my community and my people, which means the details are particular to our circumstances, but the larger story of the survivor, the savage, is essentially a universal, human one."

On November 16, 2011, Ward won the National Book Award for Fiction for Salvage the Bones. Interviewed by CNN's Ed Lavandera on November 16, 2011, she said that both her nomination and her victory had come as a surprise, given that the novel had been largely ignored by mainstream reviewers.

Ward received an Alex Award for Salvage the Bones on January 23, 2012. The Alex Awards are given out each year by the Young Adult Library Services Association to ten books written for adults that resonate strongly with young people aged 12–18. Commenting on the winning books in School Library Journal, former Alex Award committee chair Angela Carstensen described Salvage the Bones as a novel with "a small but intense following – each reader has passed the book to a friend." Ward joined the faculty at Tulane in the fall of 2014.

In July 2011, Ward wrote that she had finished the first draft of her third book, calling it the hardest thing she had ever written. It was a memoir titled Men We Reaped and was published in 2013. The book explores the lives of her brother and four other young black men who lost their lives in her hometown.

Her third novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, was released in 2017

Set in Ward's fictitious Mississippi town, Bois Sauvage, the novel is narrated from three perspectives mainly within a rural family. Jojo, a young African-American boy, navigates a maturation from childhood to adulthood. His mother, Leonie, struggles with addiction and the challenges of raising children. Finally, Richie, a wayward ghost from the Mississippi State Penitentiary, haunts Jojo and pleads with his family to help him find closure.

The novel won the 2017 National Book Award for fiction.

Ward thus became the first woman and first Black American to win two National Book Awards for Fiction. The novel also won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

In 2018, Ward contributed her Prologue from Men We Reaped to a special edition of Xavier Review (Vol.38. No.2), which includes a foreword by Thomas Bonner Jr. an afterword by Robin G. Vander (both editors of the volume), a chronology, and fifteen essays by scholars, including Trudier Harris and Keith Cartwright. At the time this was the first book-length publication on Ward.

Ward is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.

In 2020, Simon & Schuster published Ward's Navigate Your Stars, adapted from a speech the author made at Tulane's 2018 commencement.

Ward's personal essay, "On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by Pandemic", about the death of her husband, her grief, the spreading of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the resurgent Black Lives Matter movement, appeared in the September 2020 issue of Vanity Fair, guest-edited by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

In 2022, the U.S. Library of Congress selected Ward as the winner of the Library's Prize for American Fiction. At age 45, Ward is the youngest person to receive the Library's fiction award for her lifetime of work.

In July 2024, she was one of only three authors (with Elena Ferrante and George Saunders) to have the most books (three) in "The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century", a New York Times survey of 503 literary figures.

Personal life Ward lives in Mississippi and has three children. Her husband, Brandon R. Miller, died in January 2020 of acute respiratory distress syndrome at the age of 33. Ward wrote about his death in an article for Vanity Fair.

Recognition Literary prizes Year Title AwardCategory Result Ref.2008 Where the Line Bleeds First Novelist Award — 2009Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Fiction 2011 Salvage the BonesNational Book Award Fiction Kirkus Prize Fiction Los Angeles Times Book PrizeFiction National Book Award Fiction Reading Women Award Fiction 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Fiction Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Fiction Aspen Words Literary Prize — BCALA Literary Awards Fiction Dayton Literary Peace Prize Fiction Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Fiction Indies Choice Book Awards Adult Fiction NAACP Image Awards Fiction PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction — Women's Prize for Fiction — 2019 International Dublin Literary Award — Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award — 2023 Let Us Descend Kirkus Prize Fiction Libby Book Award Adult Fiction Historical Fiction 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Fiction Aspen Words Literary Prize — NAACP Image Awards Fiction Southern Book Prize Fiction

Other 2018 Time 100 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction

Nonfiction