Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward is an American novelist and professor of creative writing at Tulane University. Born in DeLisle, Mississippi, in 1977, she grew up in rural Mississippi, an environment that has profoundly shaped her fiction. She studied at the University of Michigan and Stanford University and received her MFA from Michigan. Ward is the author of four novels—Where the Line Bleeds (2008), Salvage the Bones (2011), Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), and Let Us Descend (2023)—and the memoir Men We Reaped (2013). Salvage the Bones won the National Book Award for Fiction. Sing, Unburied, Sing won a second National Book Award for Fiction—making Ward the first woman and first Black author to win the National Book Award for Fiction twice—as well as the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction in 2018 and the Indies Choice Book Award for Adult Fiction in 2018. Ward's fiction is celebrated for its lyrical power, its unflinching portrayal of poverty, race, and violence in the contemporary American South, and its deep emotional intelligence. She is the editor of the anthology The Fire This Time (2016) and a MacArthur Fellow. She lives in Mississippi.