Jesmyn Ward grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi, on the Gulf Coast, in Harrison County. Her family has been in DeLisle for generations. She went to Stanford and then Michigan for her MFA and then came home.
She has won the National Book Award for Fiction twice, Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). She is the only woman and the only Black writer to win it twice.
She still lives in DeLisle.
This is relevant information about the work.
What She Is Writing About
Ward writes about the Black South in the tradition of the Southern Gothic, the hauntings, the violence, the beauty, the way the past refuses to be past. But the Southern Gothic in her hands is not the white Southern Gothic, which is ultimately a story about decay and loss told from the perspective of the people who accumulated what decayed. Ward's Gothic is about what happens when a place extracts everything it can from you and you are still in it and you still love it.
Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) is a ghost story about Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, which was built on the site of a plantation and used convict labor, largely Black convict labor, to continue the plantation's agricultural function after emancipation. The ghosts in the novel are not metaphorical. They are specific people who died at Parchman and who cannot leave because what happened there has not been reckoned with. The novel asks what the land holds and what it takes for the holding to stop.
Salvage the Bones (2011) is set in the days before and during Hurricane Katrina, in a poor Black family in a place like DeLisle. The Katrina that Ward writes about is not the New Orleans Katrina that the national media covered. It is the Gulf Coast Katrina, the rural and small-town flooding, the communities that did not have the visual iconography of the Superdome and so did not receive the same coverage and did not receive the same aid. Her family's house flooded. She writes about what she knows.
Men We Reaped
Men We Reaped (2013) is her memoir. It names five young Black men from DeLisle who died within four years, her brother Joshua, killed by a drunk white driver who received a minimal sentence, and four others. She writes the memoir as a double helix: their deaths moving forward in time, her own life moving backward, the two threads converging on the community and the forces that shaped it.
The memoir is more devastating than the fiction for readers who know the South, because the fiction is framed as fiction even when it is not, and the memoir is not framed as anything but the truth. These men existed. They died here. These are their names.
Ward does not editorialize. She documents. The documentation is the argument.
The Counterpoint
Every agrarian writer on this list, Berry, Salatin, Taylor, Craddock, is white, and most of them write about rural life from a perspective of relative safety. The land was theirs to return to, or to choose, or to tend. The Southern Gothic they engage with is the gothic of having had something and watching it diminish.
Ward's counterpoint is essential: what does place cost when the place has never been yours, when the history of the land is a history of your family's labor extracted without compensation, when the hauntings are not of the old house but of the prison farm that replaced the plantation?
Wendell Berry writes about what a culture does to land when it treats the land as a commodity. Ward writes about what a culture does to people when it treats people as a commodity. These are the same argument seen from different positions, and you need both positions to see the whole thing.
She is the most important writer working in the Southern Gothic tradition right now.
Where to Start
Sing, Unburied, Sing first. It is the most complete expression of what she is doing and it is the better novel.
Then Men We Reaped, the memoir, which will make the fiction impossible to read the same way again.
Then Salvage the Bones, which is where the voice is most unguarded.
Let Us Descend (2023) is her most recent novel, set in the antebellum South, following an enslaved woman from the Carolinas to the Deep South. It is ambitious and difficult and exactly what a writer does when she has earned the right to demand more of her readers.
She teaches at Tulane in New Orleans. She is reachable through the English department. She gives interviews and does not require a major platform to access.
See also: What Sinners and Jason Isbell Know About Alabama That Alabama Won't Admit, on the same reckoning in film and music. And Rhiannon Giddens Is Returning What Was Stolen, on the musical version of the full accounting.
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