“I feel like in the reading I did when I was growing up, and also in the way that people talk and tell stories here in the South, they use a lot of figurative language. The stories that I heard when I was growing up, and the stories that I read, taught me to use the kind of language that I do. It's hard for me to work against that when I am writing.”

American novelist and professor of English

Jesmyn Ward is an American novelist and professor of English at Tulane University, where she holds the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities. She is known for her novels and for winning the National Book Award for Fiction twice. In 2011, she won the prize for Salvage the Bones, her second novel, which follows a family and their community as they face Hurricane Katrina. She won again in 2017 for Sing, Unburied, Sing. Her work is closely associated with family, community, and survival.