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13 quotes by Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward is an American novelist and an associate professor of English at Tulane University. She won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction and a 2012 Alex Award with her second novel Salvage the Bones, a story about familial love and community covering the 10 days preceding Hurricane Katrina, the day of the cyclone, and the day after. Prior to her appointment at Tulane, Ward was an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University...
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I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South.

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That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.

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I feel like the kind of people I write about are the kind of people I grew up with, the families that I know in my community. Most everyone is... →

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I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes... →

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When I look back on my reading habits when I was really young, I was really drawn to stories about strong girls who in some ways are outsiders.

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While I've said that there are plenty of things I dislike about the South, I can be clear that there are things I love about the South.

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Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through... →

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I read the last Harry Potter, and I cried for at least the last 70 pages. Awful! I was curled into a ball and I just kept sobbing. It was... →

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I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of 'Salvage the Bones' at Stanford. So I workshopped... →

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It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are... →

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My father owned pit bulls when I was young. He sometimes fought them. My brother and a lot of the men in my community owned pit bulls as well:... →

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My mom worked as a housekeeper, and I saw her relationship with her employers - how on the one hand she spent more time with these women than with a... →

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When I read 'Absalom, Absalom!,' I remember being really excited about it and telling all my friends they had to read it, especially my... →

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