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'The UnAmericans' is a compassionate and brilliantly rendered debut - and for a book set largely in the past, these stories feel essential to understanding the contemporary world in which we live.
Jesmyn Ward -
I worked with several writers at the University of Michigan: Nicholas Delbanco, Peter Ho Davies, Eileen Pollack, Laura Kasischke, and Thomas Lynch, who told me the same thing over and over again: Persist. Read, write, and improve: tell your stories.
Jesmyn Ward
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As an artist, I feel a certain responsibility to write about difficult subject matter.
Jesmyn Ward -
If I can get a page out in a day, I am celebrating.
Jesmyn Ward -
My brother died when he was 19, so a part of me indulges and thinks that some part of him that made him uniquely him is out there, on another plane. So inventing the fictional afterlife in 'Sing, Unburied, Sing' was a way of making that wish real.
Jesmyn Ward -
I think that fiction has a certain power.
Jesmyn Ward -
My mother helped to integrate the local elementary school in the nineteen-sixties.
Jesmyn Ward -
There's so much I love about home, but then there's a lot that I can acknowledge that I dislike about home. And acknowledging that to myself helps me see that place more clearly and to bring readers to that place.
Jesmyn Ward
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I live in the South; there are Confederate flags everywhere.
Jesmyn Ward -
I didn't start really focusing on writing until I was 24.
Jesmyn Ward -
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 -
I'm always curious about other writers' routines.
Jesmyn Ward -
There was something so empowering about having President Obama in office because I know that for many of us, that's something that we never thought that we'd see in our lifetime.
Jesmyn Ward