Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward is the historic winner—first woman and first Black American—of two National Book Awards for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Salvage the Bones (2011). Her most recent novel, Let Us Descend (2023), was shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post, Time, and the New Yorker, among other publications. Ward’s memoir, Men We Reaped (2013), 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 earned 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 is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.