The first woman writer to win the National Book Award twice, Ward is interested in how grace manifests during turmoil.
For our March Legacy issue, we highlighted the authors who have written the words that define this moment.“Just because you are refusing to engage with difficult things doesn’t mean you aren’t living with them,” Jesmyn Ward says.
We are talking at the end of December, the final month of 2025, a year of reckoning for so many. Ward says she found the year especially difficult for creating: “It felt heavy.” She understands the impulse to disengage and says, “Maybe I just want to watch Stranger Things. Maybe I just don’t want to wrestle with this right now, and that’s okay. I seek out work that doesn’t do that. But there’s room for both. I would not be the person that I am if I didn’t wrestle with both.” Ward’s second novel,Salvage the Bones, is a recounting of a working-class Black family in Mississippi preparing for Hurricane Katrina and moving through its aftermath. A definitive novel of an American tragedy, it won the National Book Award for Fiction. Her third novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, did as well, and Ward became the first woman writer and the first Black American writer to win the award twice. In addition to fiction, Ward writes creative nonfiction: Men We Reaped, her 2013 memoir, is a meditation on the deep grief of losing her brother and friends far too young. Her essay collection, On Witness and Respair, will be published this spring.What are you able to say in your essays that you aren’t able to say in your fictional work?There’s a freedom in fiction that allows me to follow wherever inspiration and creativity lead me, whereas with nonfiction I’m required to go deep. I’ve heard that phrase “shadow work.” That’s a specific type of work. Shadow work and writing creative nonfiction are the same thing. I’m plumbing the depths of my experience in order to live through it and hopefully help other people who are struggling feel some sort of kinship and feel less alone.I grew up in Mississippi. I come from a big family, very secure, a community that’s been here for generations. Even so, there were times in my life where I felt very alone.I don’t think that I started reading creative nonfiction until I was 14, 15— probably when I encountered Maya Angelou’s work I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I began realizing that creative nonfiction could meet other needs that I have, not necessarily to escape but to dig deeper.You mentioned the phrase “shadow work.” We’re at this moment right now, especially around Black art. Some readers say, “I don’t want to read about anything that is painful for a Black character. It’s too much.” People are saying, “I don’t want to do the shadow work.” But that’s a part of what you do, what an artist does. So how do you approach that in your work? I have two thoughts about that. My first thought is, that’s okay. I get to that moment in my own reading life. Maybe I don’t want to watch the latest heartbreaking documentary or read the latest book that is teaching me about the history of enslavement.When I feel like that, I indulge in the fluff and the fiction that is not going to require me necessarily to think and to feel the weight and the heaviness. But then I also know that once my hunger for that is sated, I feel other types of hunger. I will want to return to literature that does wrestle with weightier, heavier material. That’s a different hunger that I have to satisfy.And also, just because you are refusing to engage with difficult things does not mean that you are not living with them. It doesn’t mean that you’re not experiencing them. It’s one of the reasons why I write about loss, why I write about grief, why I write about people trying to find their way in the aftermath of disaster and of upheaval. I’ve lived with all of those things, and I’ve experienced all of them.You don’t have to engage with it all the time. But in order to figure out how to live with loss, how to live with grief, how to live with death, how to live with upheaval, you have to engage with the material.That kind of creative work is a key that opens a door to a different experience and a different sort of understanding that helps me to live through whatever I’m living through. This life is so difficult. You need the art that helps you to navigate this human experience.Given all of that, how do you create endings for your characters when there are these conflicting impulses? Alice Walker has talked about how radical it is to give a Black woman character a happy ending, an ending in which she is whole. What does a good ending for your characters, in the worlds you create, look like? I tend to think in terms of hope. With Let Us Descend, I knew that I was writing about an enslaved younger woman and that somewhere near the end of the book, she would have to go through the slave pens of New Orleans.That’s all I really knew, and I just wrote my way forward. As I write my way into a book, the characters begin to take on a life of their own. I develop a deeper understanding of who they are, of what the world is about, of what the characters are really struggling with. When I get closer to the end … they don’t always get what they want, but I know that I’m at the end because I’ve come to this point where there’s a hopefulness.Maybe them getting what they want is on the horizon. Let Us Descend has the most hopeful ending. Out of all my books, this character has her freedom. It’s not necessarily what she thought it would look like, but she came the closest to getting what she wanted. In my earlier novels, I leave the characters in a place where they can get there one day.I teach creative writing. My students ask me all the time, “How do you know that you’ve gotten to the end?” I always say, “You just get to a point where you feel like you’ve done everything that you can do.”How did you protect your writing time when you were first starting, and how do you protect it now?I grew up in Mississippi. My family is poor, has been for generations, and I was a first-generation college kid. When I went to college and then, afterwards, when I moved to New York and was working in publishing, I found myself in a community that was very unlike the one that I had grown up in. For the first time in my life, I was surrounded by young creatives. At that time, there was this debate, if you wanted to be a writer, whether or not you should go to an MFA program or whether or not you should just do it on your own.A lot of people that I met at that time were invested in doing it on their own. There was this resistance to MFA programs. People thought that they stamped out people’s individuality and turned out cookie-cutter writers.But I realized pretty quickly, because I was working a full-time job in publishing, that I needed the space and the structure of school in order to figure out how to be a writer. I could not work a nine-to-five and then produce creative work outside of that time.So I went to the University of Michigan and got my MFA in fiction. That was from 2003 to 2005. That was the tail end of me losing the young people in my life that I wrote about in my memoir Men We Reaped. All these kids that I’d grown up with and friends and relatives were dying really young. I felt a real sense of desperation to get it out, to write, to create. It felt like I was encountering erasure everywhere: in the classroom, in literature in general, and then of course outside of the classroom. All these young people, these people who I loved, were living and dying, and there was no account of their lives. It was as if, besides the people who loved them, nobody gave a shit. As if they were of no importance.That really motivated me. Part of that was desperation, part of it was love, part of it was feeling like this was something that I was being called to do. The MFA program really helped me develop a sense of discipline and to channel all those feelings.It was before I had kids. I was a night owl. I basically didn’t sleep at night; I would just work. I was up at midnight, 1:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m., working.It felt like a matter of life and death. I carried that sense of discipline and awareness with me throughout the years. Even after having kids and teaching at the same time, I travel, but I still carve out the time every day to do the work.I’ve been doing this for 22 years. I feel like I had gotten to this place in my life where I was like, “Okay, I sort of know my process. I know how I work.” But recently, I realized that I’m still growing, I’m still learning, that my process is not concrete, it’s not set in stone. There are no absolutes.This year has been really hard. I’m sure I’m not the only writer who feels this way. I was working on, like, a YA, middle-grade book because I signed a contract for it years ago, and the deadline came and went. I thought when I started working on the kids’ book that I understood my process: “Oh, I work on one book at a time.” But this year … I don’t know.Yeah. I was like, “Okay, I can’t work on one book at one time. I can’t just write the kids’ book, because the world as it is, if I’m going to live through this moment and write through this moment, I have to engage with what I see, with what I’m witnessing.” And so I started working on an adult literary novel at the same time and working on both of them with an equal amount of focus.The second thing that made me realize that all of this can change at any time, no matter how old you are, how long you’ve been doing this, is that around Halloween, I’d written 300 pages of the kids’ book. I paused. I maybe had two scenes to write to finish the book. And I sat with it for a second and I was just like, “It’s not doing what you wanted to do.” Basically, these 300 pages that I had were like an exploratory draft. I’ve never written an exploratory draft in my life, but I was like, “Okay, you basically wrote those 300 pages to figure stuff out. So, now what you need to do is you need to rewrite the whole book.”When you come to that realization, do you feel anxiety? Yes. That anxiety is a stopping point for a lot of people. What is it that makes you keep going? I did an event when I was on the book tour for Let Us Descend with Jason Reynolds. I asked him how long it took him to write the rough draft of his book. And he says something crazy like, “Oh, I wrote it in a month and a half.” And I was just like, “What? You wrote the entire draft of the novel in a month and a half?” I just didn’t realize that that was possible. After I got over my amazement, I sort of tucked that fact away. And so, when I got to that point on Halloween when I was like, “Oh my God, I have to rewrite this whole fucking book,” I thought, “Well, if Jason Reynolds wrote that entire draft in a month and a half, that’s what I need to do with this draft.”They always say that every book teaches you how to write it. This book taught me that that’s what it wanted.I’m writing for the child that I was. There’s a part of me that’s always six and fighting off the pit bull that attacked me. There’s a part of me that’s always that girl. I get into these moments where the odds are just ridiculous. We’ve got to fight like “no way but through.” I have to do it. I don’t have a choice.You’ve just told this story about going through this process, and there are people who will read that and think, “Well, I would just use AI.” So, what are your thoughts on that? And especially as a teacher working with students who are coming up now in this age, where everything is telling them, “Just make it easy on yourself. Just use this thing.” When I teach, one of the things that I lead with every semester is, “I’m not interested in AI. I am interested in you. Give me your work to wrestle with.”From my first book all the way up to Sing, Unburied, Sing, I sort of dimly understood that I was writing every book for a reason. But I think that it became clearer to me when I was working on Let Us Descend.At that time, my partner, my children’s father, had just passed away, in early 2020. I was in that first terrible vice of grief. When I was writing during all of this, one of the things that I realized about the person that I was writing about was that she was experiencing multiple different kinds of grief over and over and over and over again because she was enslaved. She was leaving her mother, grieving, losing her community, losing her stories, losing her family, losing any kind of agency that she had.I realized by the end of that process that I needed to write specifically about her. I needed to come to the same realization that she comes to at the end of the book. She realizes that life is a choice, and you have to choose to live it and how you want to live it and what kind of human being that you want to be. And you have to fight for it. Every day that you wake up, it’s a choice to keep going.I needed to embrace that myself, especially living through the grief that I was living through at that moment. If I would’ve plugged that story and that character into some sort of program and the program would’ve written that ending, then I wouldn’t have come to that understanding, and I needed to. For me with AI, it’s like, “What’s the point? If I’m going to feed this narrative into a program so the program can spit out an ending, then what am I doing this work for?”The stories need to be told, and I need to do the telling. There are revelations that I’m working my way toward because it enables me to keep living.
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