The Rise And Return Of Jesmyn Ward

From small-town Mississippi to an out-of-the-blue National Book Award—then back to Mississippi to write her third novel.

- Boris Kachka

JESMYN WARD is, by all accounts, a faithful friend and a l oving mother. The award-winning novelist is so devoted to family that she still lives in DeLisle, Mississippi, the largely impoverished town where she and her relatives weathered Katrina by huddling in a pickup truck after a white neighbor denied them shelter. But her love for her characters—from the hurricane survivors in her novel Salvage the Bones to the dead friends in her memoir, Men We Reaped—is brutal. Or maybe, as Ward’s friend and fellow writer Sarah Frisch puts it, “her love is as kind as it could be, but it’s a tough world.”

Sing, Unburied, Sing, Ward’s third and latest novel and her first since Salvage the Bones won a National Book Award in 2011, is about the same tough world as her previous work: the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, her own version of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. But Sing’s scope and style, its pleasures and torments, and its symphony of ghosts should put to rest Ward’s own worry “that maybe I hit my peak with Salvage.” The new novel, or at least its core idea of “a mixed-raced boy growing up in the modern South,” has been with Ward for at least eight years, even as her own literary career has arced steeply upward.

Ward first tried and failed to write Sing after finishing a draft of Salvage in 2009. She was a Stegner fellow at Stanford back then, thousands of miles from DeLisle, and had recently published a first novel,