Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, the Strauss Living Prize and the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. She was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing, and is the winner of two National Book Awards for Fiction for both Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage the Bones. She is also the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds and the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.
Exquisite, harrowing, elemental, transcendent and ultimately hopeful. The best book I’ve read in years. What a writer Jesmyn Ward is! * Louise Kennedy, author of TRESPASSES * Ward resurrects an enslaved girl out of the lost folds of the antebellum South, twists magic through every raindrop, mushroom and stalk of sugarcane, and drops you into the middle of her harrowing, unendurable, magnificent song. This is a gripping, mythic, bone-pulverizing descent into the grim darkness of American slavery – and yet somehow this novel simultaneously leaves you in awe of the human capacity to not only endure, but to ascend back to the light. A spectacular achievement -- Anthony Doerr, author of ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE A stunning achievement. Will grip you from the first word to the last -- Nathan Harris, author of THE SWEETNESS OF WATER