Jesmyn Ward, Award-winning Author and MacArthur "Genius" Grant Recipient, Kicks off Queens Spotlight Series
Queens University of Charlotte is pleased to welcome acclaimed author, Jesmyn Ward on Oct. 13 at 7 p.m. at the Sarah Belk Gambrell Center for the Arts and Civic Engagement. The keynote talk and book signing are presented by Arts at Queens as part of its Spotlight Series.
MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient and two-time National Book Award-winner, Jesmyn Ward has been hailed as the standout writer of her generation, proving her “fearless and toughly lyrical” voice in novels, memoir, and nonfiction. Betsy Burton of the American Booksellers Association called her “the new Toni Morrison.” In 2017, Ward became the first woman and the first person of color to win two National Book Awards for Fiction—joining the ranks of William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Philip Roth, and John Updike.
Ward’s stories are largely set on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, where she grew up and still lives. Her writing is deeply informed by the trauma of Katrina and its tragic social and economic repercussions. Her novel Salvage the Bones, winner of the 2011 National Book Award, is a troubling but ultimately empowering tale of familial bonds set amid the chaos of the hurricane. Likewise, Ward’s debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds, depicts what Publishers Weekly calls “a world full of despair but not devoid of hope” in the aftermath of a natural disaster.
A singular Southern odyssey that strikes at the heart of life in the rural South, Sing, Unburied, Sing, earned Ward a second National Book Award in 2017. This road novel through Mississippi’s past and present explores the bonds of a family tested by racism and poverty. Margaret Atwood called it a “wrenching new novel…[that] digs deep into the not-buried heart of the American nightmare. A must!” Sing was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2017 by The New York Times and Time. The Washington Post and Publisher’s Weekly also called Sing one of the year’s best books, and the novel was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize.
“Ward’s [Sing, Unburied, Sing] is a true triple threat, an expert in prose, human observation, and social commentary.”
— Time
In her talks, Ward shares her writing process and how her experiences growing up poor and Black in the South continue to influence her work and lead her to champion the value of hard work and the importance of respect for oneself and others.
“I understood that I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor, and the Black and the rural people of the South, so that the culture that marginalized us for so long would see that our stories were as universal, our lives as fraught and lovely and important, as theirs,” she said in her acceptance speech at the 2011 National Book Awards.
Ward received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, where she won five Hopwood Awards for her fiction, essays, and drama. She is currently a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans where she teaches creative writing. In 2017, she was recognized with a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant for her work “exploring the enduring bonds of community and familial love among poor African-Americans of the rural South against a landscape of circumscribed possibilities and lost potential.” In 2018, she was recognized among Time’s 100 Most Influential People, and she is the winner of the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. She is also the editor of the critically acclaimed anthology The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race, which NPR named one of the Best Books of 2016.
Park Road Books will be onsite with the Ward’s latest titles that she will be available to sign.