Author of the week: Jesmyn Ward

last updated 8 January 2015

Novelist Jesmyn Ward might as well have grown up in a war zone, said Chris Waddington in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. The year she graduated from college, a drunken driver back home in Mississippi killed her brother. Across the next four years, a cousin and three other friends, all young black men from her impoverished hometown, died too—in a train accident, a suicide, a murder, and a drug-related heart attack. The deaths, says the 2011 National Book Award winner, “hit me and my family so hard.” But she knew that she’d have to write about those losses one day. Men We Reaped, her potent new memoir, eulogizes each of those young men while arguing that all were brought down by a larger force. “When society tells you that your life means nothing,” she says, “it doesn’t encourage you to act in sensible ways.”

Ward has struggled with that burden herself, said Rachel Martin in NPR.org. She realized while writing the new book that she long had used alcohol to self-medicate. Even after fate spirited her off to a top college, “I knew,” she says, “that a little black girl from a poor family wasn’t worth much in the eyes of the world.” Now 36, Ward does have more hope for the next generation from DeLisle, Miss., including her 17-year-old nephew. But she still worries about his future. “There are some people in the world that will look at my nephew and see him as a thug, and think that whatever harm or violence befalls him, that he will have deserved it,” she says. “That scares me. A lot.”