My people are still poor. They're still working class. All of the characters that I write about are inspired by the community… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I love my community. I love always being able to come back and have a home. — 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
History and socio-economic inequality and all those things had, like, borne down upon my family and my community and really sort of… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I was raised in Mississippi, in a family and a community that identified as black, and I have the stories and the… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I love creating that community and writing about that place, because I think, in some ways, Bois Sauvage is like the DeLisle… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
In my family and in my community, I see people struggling with drug addiction, with poverty and the effects of generational poverty;… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I love where I'm from. I love the landscape because it is so beautiful, and I also love the people of my… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I feel like the kind of people I write about are the kind of people I grew up with, the families that… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
People ask me all the time, 'Why did I move home?' As well as I can articulate it, that's why. I moved… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
There are things about the South - the politics, the classism, the racism - that I hate, and I want to be… — 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 came to the realization that I had failed in some respects because I had been more of a benevolent narrator than… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
After I finished my first draft of 'Salvage the Bones,' I felt that I wasn't political enough. I had to be more… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
My family has been poor and working-class for generations. And we live - I live in this really small community in Southern… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
My father owned pit bulls when I was young. He sometimes fought them. My brother and a lot of the men in… — 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
