Jesmyn Ward

I wanted to write about voodoo tradition that I feel has been very important to survival of black people here: people of…

— 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

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

“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…

— Jesmyn Ward

I feel like so much of what happened in the Delta over the decades since slavery was abolished seems much closer in…

— Jesmyn Ward

“Vines catch my arms, my head; we tear through until we break out into the clearing before the fence, the field, 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…

— Jesmyn Ward

By the time I wrote my memoir, 'Men We Reaped,' I had been running from writing it for a long time. When…

— Jesmyn Ward

When I was a teenager, I was the only black girl at a small, private Episcopal school, where my tuition was paid…

— Jesmyn Ward

She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled…

— 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…

— 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…

— Jesmyn Ward

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

When I look back on my reading habits when I was really young, I was really drawn to stories about strong girls…

— Jesmyn Ward

I'm not saying I have to write a book that's ten times better than my counterparts, but I do think that I…

— Jesmyn Ward

In American culture at large, but especially in African American culture, it's a sign of weakness to ask for help.

— Jesmyn Ward

“I know Jojo is innocent because I can read it in the unmarked swell of him: his smooth face, ripe with baby…

— Jesmyn Ward

I think, when I write, one of the things that I'm really attempting to do is I'm attempting to humanize my characters.

— Jesmyn Ward

“I believe there is power in words, power in asserting our existence, our experience, our lives, through words.”

— Jesmyn Ward

Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world…

— Jesmyn Ward

“China. She will return, standing tall and straight, the milk burned out of her. She will look down on the circle of…

— Jesmyn Ward

Part of me is stuck in my childhood in the Eighties. I actually watch 'The Neverending Story,' 'Labyrinth,' and 'Legend' over and…

— Jesmyn Ward