Jesmyn Ward Quotes

Jesmyn Ward — American Novelist

Jesmyn Ward is an American novelist and an associate professor of English at Tulane University. She won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction and a 2012 Alex Award with her second novel Salvage the Bones, a story about familial love and community covering the 10 days preceding Hurricane Katrina, the day of the cyclone, and the day after. Prior to her appointment at Tulane, Ward was an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama. From 2008 to 2010, Ward had a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. She was the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi for the 2010–2011 academic year. Ward joined the faculty at Tulane in the fall of 2014. In 2013 she released her memoir Men We Reaped... (wikipedia)

I feel like the kind of people I write about are the kind of people I grew up with, the families that I know in my community. Most everyone is working-class, and there are some intact families, but a lot of families aren't.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.

I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South.

I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of 'Salvage the Bones' at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.

Jesmyn Ward Quotes

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