A two-time National Book Award winner, Jesmyn Ward has become a towering voice in American literature. With poetic and poignant writing, Ward crafts stories that follow young, Black characters as they navigate life in the rural south. The fictional town of Bois Sauvage inspired by her hometown of DeLisle, Mississippi serves as home base for all three of her novels with each title exploring similar topics such as family relationships, hope, trauma, and the anticipation and subsequent devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Like her fiction titles, Ward’s nonfiction books delve into her lived experiences from Men We Reaped in which she relives the loss of five men in her life including her brother to Navigate Your Stars which includes her inspiring 2018 commencement speech at Tulane University.
Fiction Titles
Salvage the Bones
“Enduring a hardscrabble existence as the children of alcoholic and absent parents, four siblings from a coastal Mississippi town prepare their meager stores for the arrival of Hurricane Katrina while struggling with such challenges as a teen pregnancy and a dying litter of prize puppies.”
Sing, Unburied, Sing
“Living with his grandparents and toddler sister on a Gulf Coast farm, Jojo navigates the challenges of his tormented mother’s addictions and his grandmother’s terminal cancer before the release of his father from prison prompts a road trip of danger and hope.”
Where the Line Bleeds
“Twin brothers struggle with the responsibilities of adulthood and family in the post-Katrina Mississippi Gulf coast.”
Nonfiction Titles
The Fire This Time
“Presents a continuation of James Baldwin’s 1963 “The Fire Next Time” that examines racial issues from the past half-century through essays, poems, and memoir pieces by some of the current generation’s most original thinkers and writers.”
Men We Reaped
“Recounts the loss of five young men in the author’s life to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the misfortune that can follow those who live in poverty, sharing her experiences of living through the dying as she searches through answers in her community.”
Navigate Your Stars
“The two-time National Book Award-winning author of Sing, Unburied, Sing presents a sumptuously illustrated meditation on the power of tenacity in the face of hardship as well as the importance of respect of the self and others.”
