when they used the outhouse, they pulled worms out of…

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

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

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

“The dream of her was the glow of a spent fire on a cold night: warm and welcoming.”

— Jesmyn Ward

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

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

“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

“Before all the little mean things she told me gathered and gathered and lodged like grit in a skinned knee.”

— Jesmyn Ward

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

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

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

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

I hope people who read my books feel empathy for us and really see us as complicated people.

— Jesmyn Ward

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

“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