Jesmyn Ward 10 Personal Facts, Biography, Wiki
American novelist Born: April 1, 1977 (age 43 years), De Lisle, Mississippi, United States Genres: Fiction, memoir Awards: National Book Award for Fiction, MacArthur Fellowship Nominations: PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Education: Stanford University, University of Michigan Ward lives in Mississippi and has two children. Her husband, Brandon R. Miller, died in January 2020 of a flu-like respiratory illness. Ward wrote about his death in an article for Vanity Fair. Jesmyn Ward was born in 1977 in Berkeley, California. She moved to DeLisle, Mississippi, with her family at the age of three. She developed a love-hate relationship with her hometown after having been bullied at public school by black classmates and subsequently by white students while attending a private school paid for by her mother’s employer. The first in her family to attend college, she earned a B.A. in English, in 1999, and an M.A. in media studies and communication, in 2000, both at Stanford University. Ward chose to become a writer to honor the memory of her younger brother, who was killed by a drunk driver in October 2000, just after Ward had completed her master’s degree. In 2005, Ward received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan. Shortly afterwards, she and her family became victims of Hurricane Katrina. With their house in DeLisle flooding rapidly, the Ward family set out in their car to get to a local church, but ended up stranded in a field full of tractors. When the white owners of the land eventually checked on their possessions, they refused to invite the Wards into their home, claiming they were overcrowded. Tired and traumatized, the family was eventually given shelter by another white family down the road. Ward went on to work at the University of New Orleans, where her daily commute took her through the neighborhoods ravaged by the hurricane. Empathizing with the struggle of the survivors and coming to terms with her own experience during the storm, Ward was unable to write creatively for three years – the time it took her to find a publisher for her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds.
Jesmyn Ward 10 Pics, Photos, Pictures
Jesmyn Ward 10 Fast Facts, Biography, Wiki
Jesmyn Ward is a fiction writer exploring the bonds of community and familial love among poor African Americans in the rural South. She is the author of three novels and a memoir, all set in the Gulf Coast region of her native Mississippi and centered on marginalized black communities. In prose that is simultaneously luminous and achingly honest, Ward captures moments of beauty, tenderness, and resilience against a bleak landscape of crushing poverty, racism, addiction, and incarceration. Jesmyn Ward received a B.A. (1999) and M.A. (2000) from Stanford University and an M.F.A. (2005) from the University of Michigan. Currently an associate professor in the Department of English at Tulane University, Ward was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 2008 to 2010, the Grisham-Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi from 2010 to 2011, and an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of South Alabama from 2011 to 2014. Her additional publications include the novel Where the Line Bleeds (2008), a memoir, Men We Reaped (2013), and The Fire This Time (co-editor, 2016).
