“I believe there is power in words, power in asserting our existence, our experience, our lives, through words.” — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I've been in so many writing workshops where someone hands in a story, and when the other writers in the workshop are… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I feel like if you aren't honest and if you don't let go and ease up off of the narrator, then the… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
“You my baby.” She breathes heavy, and the grate cracks and sinks to rusted stillness. “Like I drew the veil back so… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
Young people have a right to optimism, and rightly so; human beings have grown and developed and accomplished wonderful feats in the… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
“To give life...is to know what's worth fighting for. And what's love.” — 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
My time in New York really clarified things for me. I thought, 'What could I do with my life that would give… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
“Growing up out here in the country taught me things. Taught me that after the first fat flush of life, time eats… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
Life is a hurricane, and we board up to save what we can and bow low to the earth to crouch in… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
“Growing up out here in the country taught me things. Taught me that after the first fat flush of life, time eats… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
“Growing up out here in the country taught me things. Taught me that after the first fat flush of life, time eats… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I can't stop thinking about the devaluation of black life, and I find it seeping into everything I write. — 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
