Jesmyn Ward is an award-winning African American writer from Mississippi.
Raised in De Lisle, Mississippi—the real-world location on which the settings of her novels are based—Ward lived through Hurricane Katrina, seeking shelter with her family in her grandmother’s double-wide trailer. She has spoken frequently about her experience growing up in a Black, middle-class community, particularly in the wake of Katrina, and about its influence on her fiction.
“I saw an entire town demolished, people fighting over water, breaking open caskets searching for something that could help them survive,” she said in an interview with The Paris Review. “I realized that if I was going to assume the...
