Conversations with Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward (b. 1977) is arguably one of today’s most important authors. Although often compared to William Faulkner, Ward and her writings have done anything but live in that shadow since the 2008 debut of her first novel Where the Line Bleeds. She has produced four novels and a memoir that are equally harrowing and heartening, and she is the recipient of numerous major literary awards and fellowships, including two National Book Awards, for Salvage theBones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017).

Spanning from 2009 to the present, the interviews collected in ConversationswithJesmynWard display a master artist with a poetic command for words. Ward’s personality and writing style could be characterized as gentle, passionate, fastidious, queer, and brutally honest, as her soft-spoken voice and lyrical prose express a passion for the world so large and consuming that it often emanates as rage or sadness but always leaves readers with a bit of hope. She speaks at length about grief, her writing process, and a love-hate relationship with her home state of Mississippi and the South, as well as the influence that her family, hip-hop music and culture, and vigorous childhood reading have on her writing.

Kemeshia Randle Swanson, a college professor, is currently serving a joint appointment in the Departments of English and African American Studies at Mississippi State University. She previously dedicated ten years of service to the Department of English at Garner-Webb University in Boiling Springs, North Carolina. Her work focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American literature, southern literature, gender and sexualities studies, and hip-hop and popular culture. She has published in edited collections such as Words, Beats, and Life: The Global Journal of Hip-Hop Culture; Like One of the Family: Domestic Workers, Race, and In/Visibility in ＂The Help＂; and Street Lit: Representing the Urban Landscape. She is author of Maverick Feminist: To Be Female and Black in a Country Founded upon Violence and Respectability, published by University Press of Mississippi.