Jesmyn Ward

I think that fiction has a certain power.

— Jesmyn Ward

“Would a human egg let itself be seen?”

— Jesmyn Ward

I knew it would be painful to write a memoir.

— Jesmyn Ward

Without the library, I would have been lost.

— Jesmyn Ward

I didn't start really focusing on writing until I was 24.

— Jesmyn Ward

A lot of times, real life is more surreal than writing.

— Jesmyn Ward

I need the lightness of children's lit.

— Jesmyn Ward

I'm always curious about other writers' routines.

— Jesmyn Ward

I couldn't run from that desire to tell stories, that desire to tell stories about us, and about the people I loved.

— Jesmyn Ward

“Sometimes the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes it withholds.”

— Jesmyn Ward

“To give life...is to know what's worth fighting for. And what's love.”

— Jesmyn Ward

That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.

— Jesmyn Ward

We salvage the bones of our lives every day, through small tragedies and big tragedies.

— Jesmyn Ward

I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South.

— Jesmyn Ward

I can't stop thinking about the devaluation of black life, and I find it seeping into everything I write.

— Jesmyn Ward

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

— Jesmyn Ward

When I was writing my first novel, 'Where the Line Bleeds,' which had young black men as its main characters, I was…

— 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…

— 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…

— Jesmyn Ward

I thought about all those people whose suffering had been erased, and I thought, 'Why can't they speak? Why can't I undo…

— Jesmyn Ward

I've always used Southern rappers in epigraphs for my novels. For 'Sing, Unburied, Sing,' I wanted to use Big K.R.I.T. - because…

— Jesmyn Ward

By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this…

— Jesmyn Ward

The reason that I like to use classical myths as models is because African American writers and African American stories are usually…

— Jesmyn Ward

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

I'm still a bit of a reading glutton, I think, because I browse, read a bit of the back copy, flip through…

— Jesmyn Ward

I think that voodoo as a spiritual tradition has been demonized for so long in popular culture. I wanted to write against…

— Jesmyn Ward

“We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and…

— Jesmyn Ward

“Demond’s family history wasn’t so different from my own, did that mean we were living the same story over and over again,…

— Jesmyn Ward

I've found that in fiction - and this is just the kind of writer I am - I can't really work from…

— Jesmyn Ward

I love creating that community and writing about that place, because I think, in some ways, Bois Sauvage is like the DeLisle…

— Jesmyn Ward

I worked with several writers at the University of Michigan: Nicholas Delbanco, Peter Ho Davies, Eileen Pollack, Laura Kasischke, and Thomas Lynch,…

— Jesmyn Ward

Most people just aren't clear-eyed about the rural South. We think that the urban centers are the problem, and the rural areas…

— Jesmyn Ward

I hope that if the people who read my work encounter people in the real world who are like the characters that…

— Jesmyn Ward

“Walking -- the simple monotonous act of placing one foot before the other to prevent falling -- turns out not to be…

— Jesmyn Ward

“Growing up out here in the country taught me things. Taught me that after the first fat flush of life, time eats…

— Jesmyn Ward

Life is a hurricane, and we board up to save what we can and bow low to the earth to crouch in…

— Jesmyn Ward

There are things about the South - the politics, the classism, the racism - that I hate, and I want to be…

— Jesmyn Ward

“By the time we'd moved into that rambling, lopsided wooden house, I'd already fallen in love with reading. I think my love…

— Jesmyn Ward

“But race in the United States is not a tidy matter. Only three of the submitted pieces explicitly referenced the future. Most…

— Jesmyn Ward

“Where the road meets the Gulf, it skirts the beach for miles. I wish it ran straight over the water, like the…

— Jesmyn Ward