Quotes by Jesmyn Ward

About Jesmyn Ward:

Jesmyn Ward is an American novelist and an associate professor of English at Tulane University. She won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction and a 2012 Alex Award with her second novel Salvage the Bones, a story about familial love and community covering the 10 days preceding Hurricane Katrina, the day of the cyclone, and the day after. Prior to her appointment at Tulane, Ward was an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama. From 2008 to 2010, Ward had a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. She was the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi for the 2010–2011 academic year. Ward joined the faculty at Tulane in the fall of 2014. In 2013 she released her memoir Men We Reaped.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I can see her, chin to chest, straining to push Junior out, and Junior snagging on her insides, grabbing hold of what he caught on to try to stay inside her, but instead he pulled it out with him when he was born.

Jesmyn Ward

There is laughter, shrill calls. Everyone is flirting, saying in nudges and jokes and blushing what they would do in private

Jesmyn Ward

In every one of the Greeks' mythology tales, there is this: a man chasing a woman, or a woman chasing a man. There is never a meeting in the middle.

Jesmyn Ward

Life is a hurricane, and we board up to save what we can and bow low to the earth to crouch in that small space above the dirt where the wind will not reach. We honor anniversaries of deaths by cleaning graves and sitting next to them before fires, s...

Jesmyn Ward

While I've said that there are plenty of things I dislike about the South, I can be clear that there are things I love about the South.

Jesmyn Ward

I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of 'Salvage the Bones' at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.

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 through language.

Jesmyn Ward

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

Jesmyn Ward

I feel like the kind of people I write about are the kind of people I grew up with, the families that I know in my community. Most everyone is working-class, and there are some intact families, but a lot of families aren't.

Jesmyn Ward

When I look back on my reading habits when I was really young, I was really drawn to stories about strong girls who in some ways are outsiders.

Jesmyn Ward

I read the last Harry Potter, and I cried for at least the last 70 pages. Awful! I was curled into a ball and I just kept sobbing. It was embarrassing. I was loud, and I just kept wiping tears away so I could see the page.

Jesmyn Ward

When I read 'Absalom, Absalom!,' I remember being really excited about it and telling all my friends they had to read it, especially my writer friends.

Jesmyn Ward

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

Jesmyn Ward

My father owned pit bulls when I was young. He sometimes fought them. My brother and a lot of the men in my community owned pit bulls as well: sometimes they fought them for honor, never for money.

Jesmyn Ward

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

Jesmyn Ward

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.

Jesmyn Ward

It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as 'other.'

Jesmyn Ward

Author Bio

  • NameJesmyn Ward
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • Born1977
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionAuthor; Novelist
  • AwardsNational Book Award