Jesmyn Ward

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Jesmyn Ward (2011)

Jesmyn Ward (* 1977 in DeLisle , Mississippi ) is an American writer who has received the National Book Award for Fiction twice.

Life

Ward comes from an African American family. She grew up in the small town of DeLisle in the Mississippi countryside. After she was teased during her school days by both her black schoolmates and later by white classmates at a private school, a love-hate relationship developed with her hometown.

Ward graduated from the University of Michigan with a Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) in creative writing in 2005 and returned to Mississippi. It was there that she and her family witnessed the events of Hurricane Katrina in August of that year. During this time her house was flooded and the subsequent escape in the car did not get her very far. In the end, the whole family came to live with strangers. After the hurricane, Ward began her work at the University of New Orleans . On the way to work at her university, she was able to compare the damage that other residents of the coastal region had suffered with her own experiences.

In 2008 Ward's first book Where the Line Bleeds was published, then she wrote her award-winning book Salvage the Bones , which was published in English in 2011 and in German in 2013. Her 2013 book Men We Reaped deals with the fate of her brother and four other young black people who lost their lives in their hometown.

Ward is an Associate Professor of English at Tulane University . Prior to her appointment at Tulane University, she was a lecturer in creative writing at the University of South Alabama .

In 2017 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship . In the same year she won the National Book Award for the second time for her novel Sing, Unburied, Sing . The work portrays an African-American family in a fictional small town in Mississippi in the time after Hurricane Katrina . While the children grow up with their grandparents, the father is in prison and the mother is a drug addict. Ward said he wanted to write a novel in the tradition of the classic southern odysseys like the fruits of anger , When I Was Dying or Huckleberry Finn , only with a black family in the center.

2019 Ward was in the anthology New Daughters of Africa by Margaret Busby added.

Works

  • Where the Line Bleeds . Agate Publishing. 2008, ISBN 978-1-932841-38-1 .
  • Salvage the Bones . Bloomsbury Publishing, London 2011, ISBN 978-1-60819-627-2 .
    • Before the storm. Novel. German by Ulrike Becker. Antje Kunstmann Verlag, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-88897-861-6 .
  • Men we reaped: a memoir . Bloomsbury Publishing, London 2013, ISBN 978-1-60819-521-3 .
  • The Fire This Time . Collection of essays. Simon & Schuster, 2016
  • Sing, Unburied, Sing . Novel. Scribner, 2017
    • Sing, you living and dead, sing. Novel. German by Ulrike Becker. Antje Kunstmann Verlag, Munich 2018, ISBN 978-3-95614-224-6 .

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jesmyn Ward Associate Professor (accessed February 4, 2018)
  2. ↑ Jesmyn Ward, 40, fiction writer living in DeLisle, Mississippi , NPR, October 11, 2017, accessed October 8, 2018
  3. ↑ National Book Award for Jesmyn Ward and Masha Gessen . In: Spiegel Online , November 16, 2017
  4. ↑ Katrina left us to learn to crawl. In: FAZ . September 13, 2013, p. 32.
personal data
SURNAME Ward, Jesmyn
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH 1977
PLACE OF BIRTH DeLisle , Mississippi , USA