Literary Birthday – 1 April – Jesmyn Ward

Happy Birthday, Jesmyn Ward, born on 1 April 1977.

Jesmyn Ward Quotes

1. I wanted to be my own heroine. (Men We Reaped)
2. When I was writing the memoir, every page was a battle with myself because I knew I had to tell the truth. That’s what the memoir form demands. (Men We Reaped)
3. I want each character to be as unique as possible. I want them to reflect something of who they are in the way that they move and in how their bodies work. (The Rumpus)
4. I think art, especially literature, has the particular power to immerse the viewer or reader into another world. This is especially powerful in literature, when a reader lives the experience of the characters. So if the characters are human and real enough, then readers will feel empathy for them. (Esquire)
5. How amazing is it that literature has the power to subvert preconceived notions about black people, to change readers’ perceptions of us, to induce empathy, to persuade them through feeling that black lives matter? (Esquire)
6. I think my love for books sprang from my need to escape the world I was born into, to slide into another where words were straightforward and honest, where there was clearly delineated good and evil, where I found girls who were strong and smart and creative and foolish enough to fight dragons, to run away from home to live in museums, to become child spies, to make new friends and build secret gardens. (A-Z)
7. I feel like if you aren’t honest and if you don’t let go and ease up off of the narrator, then the story doesn’t take up a life of its own, and the characters can’t take up a life of their own. You handicap the story when you try to protect your characters. (Guernica)
8. That’s why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal. (PBS)
9. I was thinking about the difference in voice between the different characters. Each voice has to be unique. Hypothetically you should be able to read each chapter without the heading that tells you who is telling the story. (Guernica)

Jesmyn Ward is one of the most acclaimed American writers of the 21st century. She is also a professor of English at Tulane University. She writes novels and non-fiction works that explore the lives of poor African Americans living in Mississippi. She is the first woman and the first Black American novelist to win the National Book Award for fiction twice. In 2011, she won it for Salvage the Bones. She won it the second time for Sing, Unburied, Sing in 2017. In 2022 Ward won the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. At the time she was the youngest winner to be awarded the prize. As a fiction writer, Ward is often compared to novelists William Faulkner and Toni Morrison. Ward is also the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds and the memoir Men We Reaped. Her book of essays, On Witness and Respair, will be published in 2026. Follow her on Instagram.

Source for image: Jesmimi, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jesmyn_Ward.jpeg

by Amanda Patterson

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