My mother worked for a white family that lived in one of the mansions on the beach. The husband in the family… — 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
“The dream of her was the glow of a spent fire on a cold night: warm and welcoming.” — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
The women here are the ones that hold the families together. So if my mom were to be unhappy with me, in… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I'm from a small town on the bottom edge of Mississippi, very near New Orleans and the Louisiana border. My family has… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
When I was a teenager, I was the only black girl at a small, private Episcopal school, where my tuition was paid… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
Because everyone grows up together in my small hometown, everyone knows everyone else. And there are such large extended families that a… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
On one hand, I can say, you know, I had many family members - I had many people in my extended family… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
My mom is the kind of mom, when we would go to a friend of the family's house, and they would offer… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
“We talked about our families, about his father. He said: He old—a old head. And I knew what he meant without him… — 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
“Demond’s family history wasn’t so different from my own, did that mean we were living the same story over and over again,… — 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've also never written about home in this way before. I guess a lot of it is subconscious and I am intuitively… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
My family and I survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005; we left my grandmother's flooding house, were refused shelter by a white family,… — 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
When you have a family, even though you might move a lot, you collect all of these things. It's the detritus of… — 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
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
“Men’s bodies litter my family history. The pain of the women they left behind pulls them from the beyond, makes them appear… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I would encounter W. E. B. Du Bois and the term double consciousness. When I read it, I thought about sitting in… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
It's impossible for most black Americans to construct full family trees. Official census records, used by so many genealogy enthusiasts to piece… — 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
