Throughout my career, when I have been rejected, there was sometimes subtext, and it was this: People will not read your work… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I'm always thinking about time. That's one of themes I return to in my work, the way the past bears on the… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I've found that in fiction - and this is just the kind of writer I am - I can't really work from… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
While I admire writers who are able to write with a vitality based on order and action, I work in a different… — 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 hope that I never have to work in a place that sells large quantities of jeans ever again. Jeans are rough!… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I think that being a parent has expanded my writing, expanded my understanding of my characters, and has added a depth and… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I feel like in the reading I did when I was growing up, and also in the way that people talk and… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I try to treat writing as part of my daily routine: I write for at least two hours, five days per week.… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
'As I Lay Dying,' I reread that often. That's the first work of Faulkner's that I read that so amazed me and… — 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
