Jesmyn Ward Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Jesmyn Ward Biography

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University. She is the author of the novels Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, which won the 2011 National Book Award, and Sing, Unburied, Sing, which won the 2017 National Book Award. She is also the editor of the anthology The Fire This Time and the author of the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

From 2008-2010, Ward had a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. She was the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi for the 2010-2011 academic year. In 2016, the American Academy of Arts and Letters selected Ward for the Strauss Living Award. She lives in Mississippi.

In 2022, aged 45, she was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, making her the youngest person to receive the lifetime achievement award, which honors "an American literary writer whose body of work is distinguished not only for its mastery of the art but also for its originality of thought and imagination."

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