“The dream of her was the glow of a spent fire on a cold night: warm and welcoming.” — 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
It took me a long time to write again because Katrina destroyed the home I loved, and that robbed me of hope. — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
Before Hurricane Katrina, I always felt like I could come back home. And home was a real place, and also it had… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
“Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you… — 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
There's so much I love about home, but then there's a lot that I can acknowledge that I dislike about home. And… — 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
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
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
At one time, when I was eight years old, my mother and father, my brother and my sisters - we had to… — 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
I think my love for books sprang from my need to escape the world I was born into, to slide into another… — 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 Image
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 Image
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 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 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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
“Before all the little mean things she told me gathered and gathered and lodged like grit in a skinned knee.” — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
