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. – Jesmyn Ward
I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South. – Jesmyn Ward
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 against the trend in fiction. – Jesmyn Ward
That’s why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal. – Jesmyn Ward
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 the entire thing. – Jesmyn Ward
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 embarrassing. I was loud, and I just kept wiping tears away so I could see the page. – Jesmyn Ward
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 ghetto-ized as ‘other.’ – Jesmyn Ward
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 lot of her friends, and how in certain ways they were friends. But then they weren’t. – Jesmyn Ward
When I read ‘Absalom, Absalom!,’ I remember being really excited about it and telling all my friends they had to read it, especially my writer friends. – Jesmyn Ward
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 language. – Jesmyn Ward
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: sometimes they fought them for honor, never for money. – Jesmyn Ward
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. – Jesmyn Ward
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 working-class, and there are some intact families, but a lot of families aren’t. – Jesmyn Ward
