If I'm honest about the people that I love, then I need my characters to live through the same things that the… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I don't really base any of my characters on specific people that I know, although my characters are informed by the kind… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I was thinking about the difference in voice between the different characters. Each voice has to be unique. Hypothetically you should be… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I think that voodoo as a spiritual tradition has been demonized for so long in popular culture. I wanted to write against… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
It's always hard for a writer to make herself into a character; I had to figure out what my defining characteristics were,… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I feel like if you aren't honest and if you don't let go and ease up off of the narrator, then the… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I hope that if the people who read my work encounter people in the real world who are like the characters that… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I want each character to be as unique as possible. I want them to reflect something of who they are in the… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I'm not saying I have to write a book that's ten times better than my counterparts, but I do think that I… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I wanted to write about voodoo tradition that I feel has been very important to survival of black people here: people of the African… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share
I think that voodoo as a spiritual tradition has been demonized for so long in popular culture. I wanted to write against that and… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share
There's so much I love about home, but then there's a lot that I can acknowledge that I dislike about home. And acknowledging that… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share
“The dream of her was the glow of a spent fire on a cold night: warm and welcoming.” — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share
The first writer that I think of immediately that I studied with at Michigan is Peter Ho Davies. He was really important to me,… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share
I feel like so much of what happened in the Delta over the decades since slavery was abolished seems much closer in the Delta,… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share
“Vines catch my arms, my head; we tear through until we break out into the clearing before the fence, the field, the barn, the… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share
“Before all the little mean things she told me gathered and gathered and lodged like grit in a skinned knee.” — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share
People give the South a bad rap. It's often stereotyped as backwards and close-minded and dogmatic, and all of those things have been true.… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share
By the time I wrote my memoir, 'Men We Reaped,' I had been running from writing it for a long time. When the events… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share
When I was a teenager, I was the only black girl at a small, private Episcopal school, where my tuition was paid by the… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share
She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies,… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share
I hope people who read my books feel empathy for us and really see us as complicated people. — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share
When I was writing my first novel, 'Where the Line Bleeds,' which had young black men as its main characters, I was very invested… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share
“Lot of folks was in there for stealing food because everybody was poor and starving, and even though White people couldn’t get your work… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share
