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 Read Quote
I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
When I was writing my first novel, ‘Where the Line Bleeds,’ which had young black men as its main characters, I was very invested in telling the story and also very worried about the effects the story would have. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
After I finished my first draft of ‘Salvage the Bones,’ I felt that I wasn’t political enough. I had to be more honest about the realities of the community I was writing about. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
I can’t stop thinking about the devaluation of black life, and I find it seeping into everything I write. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
I think art, especially literature, has the particular power to immerse the viewer or reader into another world. This is especially powerful in literature, when a reader lives the experience of the characters. So if the characters are human and real enough, then readers will feel empathy for them. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans – but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was? Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
I was raised in Mississippi, in a family and a community that identified as black, and I have the stories and the experiences to go with it. One of my great-great grandfathers was killed by a gang of white Prohibition patrollers. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
I think that the first book that made me think that I could try to be a writer – or that made me aware that a young black woman from the South could write about the South – was Alice Walker’s ‘The Color Purple,’ which I read for the first time when I was in junior high. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote