“My mom worked as a housekeeper, and I saw her relationship with her employers - how on the one hand she spent more time with these women than with a lot of her friends, and how in certain ways they were friends. But then they weren't.”

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.