Biblical myth is as integral to the spirit of the South as the heat and humidity. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
I feel a lot of pressure when I’m writing because I know, you know, if they looked at a synopsis of the book, what they read could only confirm all the stereotypes that they have about us and about people like us. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
It’s impossible for most black Americans to construct full family trees. Official census records, used by so many genealogy enthusiasts to piece together their families’ pasts, don’t include our non-European ancestors. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that’s it. I didn’t write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
History and socio-economic inequality and all those things had, like, borne down upon my family and my community and really sort of narrowed our choices. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
By the time I wrote my memoir, ‘Men We Reaped,’ I had been running from writing it for a long time. When the events in the book were happening, I knew I’d probably write about them one day. I didn’t want to. I’d studied fiction, and I was committed to establishing myself as a fiction writer first. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
While I admire writers who are able to write with a vitality based on order and action, I work in a different vein. I often feel that if I can get the language just right, the language hypnotizes the reader. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
My family and I survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005; we left my grandmother’s flooding house, were refused shelter by a white family, and took refuge in trucks in an open field during a Category Five hurricane. I saw an entire town demolished, people fighting over water, breaking open caskets searching for something that could help them survive. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
