Poets & Writers Theater

“I write toward what hurts. I write toward the truth, and I tell it again. I scribe the whole.” In this National Book Festival event, Jesmyn Ward, recipient of the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, speaks about how her grandmother influenced her work as a writer and joins Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden in a conversation about her award-winning novels, grief writing, and cultural authenticity.

In this Waterstones video, CJ Hauser, author of The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays (Doubleday, 2022), talks about the books that have inspired them as a writer, which include Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward; I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins; and Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters.

“It’s going to be the first thing someone lays their eyes on before they read it.” Jaya Miceli, art director at Scribner, discusses her love of books covers and how the jacket designs were created for several popular novels, such as Rachel Lyon’s Self-Portrait With Boy and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied Sing.

“When you see yourself reflected in literature, it enlarges your ideas of what is possible for you.” MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient Jesmyn Ward takes PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown on a tour of her hometown in Mississippi and shares the parts of her life and community that inspire her writing. Ward is the winner of the 2017 National Book Award in fiction for Sing, Unbured, Sing (Scribner, 2017).

“I don’t think of myself as brilliant—I think of myself as a hard worker.” Jesmyn Ward reads from and talks about her third novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing (Scribner, 2017), on Yahdon Israel’s web interview series, LIT.

“I didn’t understand that I had to be ruthless. I didn’t understand that my job as a writer wasn’t to coddle my characters and create these fairy tales for them to live.” At Brown University's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Jesmyn Ward and Edwidge Danticat discuss writing about their homes and the power of place.

In the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine Jesmyn Ward discusses her new memoir, Men We Reaped. This video clip shows the author reading from Salvage the Bones, a novel for which she won the 2011 National Book Award.