A Year in Reading: Jesmyn Ward

December 5, 2017

The Half Has Never Been Told is a mighty story. The book chronicles the conditions the enslaved suffered under, and then details how that system of torture was necessary to the very founding of the United States, and how it was instrumental to the modern world we know. Like the best books do, it made me understand the world differently.

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received her MFA from the University of Michigan and is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University. Ward’s latest novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, won the 2017 National Book Award. She is the author of the novels Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, which won the 2011 National Book Award. She is also the editor of the anthology The Fire This Time and the author of the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2016, the American Academy of Arts and Letters selected Ward for the Strauss Living award. She lives in Mississippi with her family.