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
She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled… — 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
I grew up in a lot of different homes when I was younger: my parents rented trailers and small, boxy houses set… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
My mother helped to integrate the local elementary school in the nineteen-sixties. — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
My father owned pit bulls when I was young. He sometimes fought them. My brother and a lot of the men in… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
As a parent, you want to protect your children, but the fact of racism in this country, of inequality, that is still… — 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
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
“Junior, stop being orner.” It’s what Mama used to say to us when we were little, and I say it to Junior… — 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
“But my father could be dark too. He was attracted to violence, to the basic beauty of fighting, the way it turned… — 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 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
