So, yes, I feel like I spent years trying to figure out how to write about this place and live here as an adult. It's always easier to leave a place like this than it is to return. I suffered from homesickness throughout my twenties and early thirties, and so I wanted to come back home. Jesmyn Ward: I started to seriously learn how to write when I was in my teens, and I knew from then that I wanted to write about the place I came from. When did you realize you wanted to write about your own community and write about it from within? I wanted to ask you first about the powerful sense of place in your work. When Jojo's white father, Michael, is released from Parchman Prison in up-country Mississippi, things turn even darker and prophetic.Īnderson Tepper spoke to Ward by phone about returning home, the presence of history in the South, and the legacies of William Faulkner and Zora Neale Hurston, among others. Told in alternating chapters by Leonie and her 13-year-old son, Jojo, the novel soars with a polyphony of voices, human and animal, living and dead-including those of the ghosts of a former child prisoner, Richie, and Leonie's murdered brother, Given. With her new novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, she returns to the Mississippi Gulf Coast and the fictional town of Bois Savage. She followed up that book with Men We Reaped, an account of her youth in DeLisle, Mississippi, and the violent deaths of several young black men close to her (including her brother), as well as The Fire this Time, a collection of writing on race that she edited and contributed to.

In the few years since her award-winning 2011 novel, Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward has established herself as one of the most vital authors of her generation.

Ward salvage