Publication Order of Bois Sauvage Books
| Where the Line Bleeds | 2008 |
| Salvage the Bones | 2011 |
| Sing, Unburied, Sing | 2017 |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Let Us Descend | 2023 |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
| Mother Swamp | 2022 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| Men We Reaped | 2013 |
| The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race (Editor) | 2016 |
| Navigate Your Stars | 2020 |
| On Witness and Respair | 2026 |
About Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward is an American novelist and a professor of English at Tulane University who has won the National Book Award for Fiction twice, for “Salvage the Bones” in 2011 and “Sing, Unburied, Sing” in 2017. Her first three novels are set in the fictional Mississippi town of Bois Sauvage.
Ward was born on 1 April 1977 in Berkeley, California, and her parents returned to their home town of DeLisle, Mississippi, when she was three. The first in her family to attend college, she took a BA in English and an MA in media studies and communication at Stanford University. Her younger brother was killed by a drunk driver in October 2000, and she chose to become a writer to honour his memory. She completed an MFA in creative writing at the University of Michigan in 2005, shortly before she and her family lived through Hurricane Katrina in DeLisle.
Her debut, “Where the Line Bleeds” (2008), follows twin brothers Joshua and Christophe after their high school graduation in a small town on the Mississippi coast. “Salvage the Bones” covers the days around Hurricane Katrina in the lives of the pregnant teenager Esch Batiste, her three brothers and their father. “Sing, Unburied, Sing” is narrated by a boy named Jojo, his mother Leonie and Richie, a ghost from the Mississippi State Penitentiary. It also won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and made Ward the first woman and the first Black American to win the National Book Award for Fiction twice.
Her fourth novel, “Let Us Descend” (2023), follows Annis, who is taken in shackles from the Carolina coast to a sugar plantation near New Orleans. “Mother Swamp”, a short story set in Louisiana, was released by Amazon Original Stories in 2022.
Ward’s non-fiction includes the memoir “Men We Reaped” (2013), about her brother and four other young Black men who died in her home town, and “Navigate Your Stars” (2020), adapted from a commencement speech she gave at Tulane in 2018. She edited “The Fire This Time” (2016), a collection of writing on race that takes James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” as its starting point. Her essay collection “On Witness and Respair” was published by Scribner in May 2026. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017 and, in 2022, the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, the youngest writer to be given it. She lives in Mississippi.
Photo: Frypie, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).