Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, the Strauss Living Prize, and the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. She is the historic winner–first woman and first Black American–of two National Book Awards for Fiction for Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). She is also the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds and the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.
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Let Us Descend (Oprah's Book Club)
Let Us Descend (Oprah's Book Club)
Jesmyn Ward is always brilliant, and this is no exception. Equally devastating and uplifting, this is the story of both slavery and Black American reclamation of the South. Told with gorgeous, lyrical prose, it will satiate any literary appetite.
Listen to Jesmyn Ward in conversation about Let Us Descend on Poured Over: The B&N Podcast.
