Jesmyn Ward, author,

Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi. She is a former Stegner fellow at Stanford and Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Her novels, Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, are both set on the Mississippi coast where she grew up. Bloomsbury will publish her memoir about an epidemic of deaths of young black men in her community. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of South Alabama.

Her debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds (2008), was an Essence Magazine Book Club selection, the recipient of a Black Caucus of the ALA Honor Award, and a finalist for both the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She lives in Alabama.

Jesmyn Ward 2011 National Book Awards acceptance speech (scroll to 21:18-mark)

Salvage the Bones: A Novel
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Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (August 30, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1608195228
ISBN-13: 978-1608195220
Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches

Jesmyn Ward's, Salvage the Bones, wins the 2011 National Book Award for fiction

A 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Nominated Book

Selected as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012 by the New York Times

A stunning new voice from the Gulf Coast delivers a gritty but tender novel about family and poverty in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina.

A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets; she's fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting.

As the twelve days that make up the novel's framework yield to their dramatic conclusion, this unforgettable family-motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce-pulls itself up to face another day. A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.

Where the Line Bleeds
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Paperback: 230 pages
Publisher: Agate Bolden (November 1, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1932841385
Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.8 inches

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Joshua and Christophe are twins, raised by a blind grandmother and a large extended family in a rural town on Mississippi's Gulf Coast. They've just finished high school and need to find jobs, but in a failing post-Katrina economy, it's not easy. Joshua gets work on the docks, but Christophe's not so lucky. Desperate to alleviate the family's poverty, he starts to sell drugs. He can hide it from his grandmother but not his twin, and the two grow increasingly estranged. Christophe's downward spiral is accelerated first by crack, then by the reappearance of the twins' parents: Cille, who abandoned them, and Sandman, a creepy, predatory addict. Sandman taunts Christophe, eventually provoking a shocking confrontation that will ultimately damn or save both twins. Ward inhabits these characters, and this world ' black Creole, poor, and drug-riddled, yet shored by family and community' to a rare degree, without a trace of irony or distance.