Jesmyn Ward: podcast appearances and interviews

Jesmyn Ward is an American novelist and an English professor at Tulane University where she holds the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities. She gained recognition for her literary work with her second novel Salvage the Bones, which won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction. The novel explores themes of familial love and community amidst the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Ward's writing continued to receive acclaim with her 2017 novel Sing, Unburied, Sing, which also received the National Book Award for Fiction. She is notable for being the only woman and only African American to have won the National Book Award for Fiction twice. Most of her early novels are set in the fictional Mississippi town of Bois Sauvage, reflecting her connection to the region. Her fourth novel, Let Us Descend, features a main character named Annis who appears to inhabit an earlier period in Bois Sauvage's history, involving her being shackled from the Carolina coast and compelled to work on a Mississippi sugar plantation near New Orleans.