Jesmyn Ward is an award-winning, African-American writer from Mississippi. She is the recipient of several awards for her novels, Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), Salvage the Bones (2011), Where the Line Bleeds (2008), and for her memoir, The Men We Reaped (2013). Betsy Burton of the American Booksellers Association has called her “the new Toni Morrison.”
Raised in De Lisle, Mississippi—the real-world location on which the settings of both her novels are based—Ward lived through Hurricane Katrina, seeking shelter with her family in her grandmother’s double-wide trailer (PBS). She has spoken frequently about her experience growing up in a black, middle-class community, particularly in the...
