Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, and the Strauss Living Prize. She is the winner of two National Book Awards for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Salvage the Bones (2011). She is also the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds and the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. She is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.
"In her first novel since the National Book Award-winning Salvage
the Bones (2011), Ward renders richly drawn characters, a strong
sense of place, and a distinctive style that is at once
down-to-earth and magical."
--Booklist
"Sing, Unburied Sing is Ward's third novel and her most ambitious
yet. Her lyrical prose takes on, alternately, the tones of a road
novel and a ghost story ... Sing, which is longlisted for a 2017
National Book Award, establishes Ward as one of the most poetic
writers in the conversation about America's unfinished business in
the black South."
--The Atlantic
"Sing, Unburied, Sing is many things: a road novel, a slender epic
of three generations and the ghosts that haunt them, and a portrait
of what ordinary folk in dire circumstances cleave to as well as
what they -- and perhaps we all -- are trying to outrun."
--New York Times Book Review
"[Sing, Unburied, Sing has] a fresh, visceral resonance ... [its]
story of grief, racism and poverty isn't only Mississippi's story
but our country's. So, too, let us hope, is its story of resilience
and grace.
--St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"[As] in everything she writes, Ward's gorgeous evocation of the
burden of history reminds me of Mississippi's most famous writer,
in a novel with more than a trace of As I Lay Dying ... Always
clear-eyed, Ward knows history is a nightmare. But she insists all
the same that we might yet awake and sing."
--Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal
"[A] tour de force ... Ward is an attentive and precise writer who
dazzles with natural and supernatural observations and lyrical
details ... she continues telling stories we need to hear with rare
clarity and power."
--O, the Oprah Magazine
"[Jesmyn Ward is] one of the most powerfully poetic writers in the
country ... Readers may be reminded of the trapped spirits in
George Saunders' recent novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, but Toni
Morrison's Beloved is a more direct antecedent."
--Albany Times Union
"After winning the National Book Award for Salvage the Bones, Ward
is back, with an epic family saga, an odyssey through rural
Mississippi's past and present."
--The Philadelphia Inquirer
"As long as America has novelists such as Jesmyn Ward, it will not
lose its soul. "Sing, Unburied, Sing," the story of a few days in
the lives of a tumultuous Mississippi Gulf Coast family and the
histories and ghosts that haunt it, is nothing short of
magnificent. Combining stark circumstances with magical realism, it
illuminates America's love-hate tug between the races in a way that
we seem incapable of doing anywhere else but in occasional blessed
works of art."
--Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Electric ... a harrowing panorama of the rural South."
--L.A. Review of Books
"From the opening pages of Sing, Unburied, Sing, you know you're in
for a unique experience among the pecan trees and dusty roads of
rural Mississippi. This intricately layered story combines mystical
elements with a brutal view of racial tensions in the modern-day
American South...Visitations from dead people, tales of snakes that
turn into "scaly birds' whose feathers allow recipients to
fly--this material would have felt mannered in the hands of a
lesser writer. But Ward skillfully weaves realistic and
supernatural elements into a powerful narrative. The writing,
though matter-of-fact in its depiction of prejudice, is poetic
throughout...an important work from an astute observer of race
relations in 21st-century America."
--BookPage
"Ghosts, literal and literary, haunt nearly every page of Sing,
Unburied, Sing -- a novel whose boundaries between the living and
the dead shift constantly, like smoke or sand. Set on the Gulf
Coast of Mississippi (a place rich in oil rigs and atmosphere, if
almost nothing else), the book's Southern gothic aura recalls the
dense, head-spinning prose of William Faulkner or Flannery
O'Connor. But the voice is entirely Ward's own, a voluptuous
magical realism that takes root in the darkest corners of human
behavior ... Ward, whose Salvage the Bones won a National Book
Award, has emerged as one of the most searing and singularly gifted
writers working today. Grade: A."
--Entertainment Weekly
"Gorgeous ... Always clear-eyed, Ward knows history is a nightmare.
But she insists all the same that we might yet awaken and
sing."
--Chicago Tribune
"However eternal its concerns, Sing, Unburied, Sing, Ward's new
book, is perfectly poised for the moment. It combines aspects of
the American road novel and the ghost story with a timely treatment
of the long aftershocks of a hurricane and the opioid epidemic
devouring rural America."
--The New York Times
"If Sing, Unburied, Sing is proof of anything, it's that when it
comes to spinning poetic tales of love and family, and the social
metastasis that often takes place but goes unspoken of in
marginalized communities--let alone the black American
South--Jesmyn Ward is, by far, the best doing it today. Another
masterpiece."
--Jason Reynolds, author of Ghost "The connection between the
injustices of the past and the desperation of present are clearly
drawn in Sing, Unburied, Sing, a book that charts the lines between
the living and the dead, the loving and the broken. I am a huge fan
of Jesmyn Ward's work, and this book proves that she is one of the
most important writers in America today."
--Ann Patchett, author of Commonwealth "Sing, Unburied, Sing is a
road novel turned on its head, and a family story with its feet to
the fire. Lyric and devastating, Ward's unforgettable characters
straddle past and present in this spellbinding return to the rural
Mississippi of her first book. You'll never read anything like
it."
--Ayana Mathis, author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie "Read Jesmyn
Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing and you'll feel the immense weight of
history--and the immense strength it takes to persevere in the face
of it. This novel is a searing, urgent read for anyone who thinks
the shadows of slavery and Jim Crow have passed, and anyone who
assumes the ghosts of the past are easy to placate. It's hard to
imagine a more necessary book for this political era."
--Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You
"If you've already encountered Jesmyn Ward, you need know nothing
more than that she has a new book out. If you haven't, put Sing,
Unburied, Sing at the top of your must-read list. [Ward's] writing
is page-turning. In Sing, Unburied, Sing, she puts the reader in
the car, palpably rendering the oppressive heat, Kayla's misery,
Jojo's anxiety, the crustiness of their clothing, their
unquenchable thirst and the whole electrified atmosphere. Perhaps
the most memorable book I've read this year, Sing, Unburied, Sing
would be an outstanding book club choice."
--Inside Jersey
"If William Faulkner mined the South for gothic,
stream-of-consciousness tragedy, and Toni Morrison conjured magical
realism from the corroding power of the region's race hatred, then
Ward is a worthy heir to both. This is not praise to be taken
lightly. Ward has the command of language and the sense of place,
the empathy and the imagination, to carve out her own place among
the literary giants."
--The Dallas Morning News
"In her follow-up to the National Book Award-winning Salvage the
Bones, Ward ambitiously fractures the extended family she portrays
along race lines and moves her narrative from the tense realism of
Southern rural poverty and prejudice to an African American-rooted
magic realism ... The narrative ... sails through to an
otherworldly, vividly rendered ending. Lyrical yet tough, Ward's
distilled language effectively captures the hard lives, fraught
relationships, and spiritual depth of her characters."
--Library Journal, starred review
"In this lush and lonely novel, Ward lets the dead sing. It's a
kind of burial."
--NPR
"Jesmyn Ward leads readers into rural Mississippi, to the pain and
grief and struggle of a family who can't escape history ... Ward's
uniquely lyrical prose ties the family's modern-day struggles to
the literal ghosts of Southern history."
--Minnesota Public Radio
"Jesmyn Ward's new novel is like a modern Beloved, with the cruelty
of the criminal justice system swapped in for the torments of
slavery ... Sing marks Ward as the sharpest voice in the
contemporary conversation around the past's relationship to the
present ... Sing is an expansive endeavor."
--Slate
"Macabre and musical. [Ward] has a knack for capturing vivid
details from contemporary poverty: skeletal houses covered in
insulation paper, laborers on the prison farm 'bent and scuttling
along like hermit crabs.' Her lyrical language elevates desperation
into poetic reverie ... a gripping and melodious indictment of
modern racial injustices."
--Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Ms. Ward has mastered a lyrical and urgent blend of past and
present here, conjuring the unrestful spirits of black men murdered
by white men, and never shying away from the blatant brutality of
white supremacy ... Ms. Ward's musical language is the stuff of
formidable novelists, and never has it been more finely tuned."
--The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"No reason to delay this spell-bound verdict: With Sing, Unburied,
Sing, her third novel, Jesmyn Ward becomes the standard-bearer for
contemporary Southern fiction, its fullest, most forceful, most
vibrant, and most electrifying voice ... While Ward, born and
raised in a small coastal community near Pass Christian,
Mississippi, is operating within the contours of the Southern
literary tradition--in the swampy lilt of her prose, in the scope
of her concerns, in the way she entangles setting and
character--she is also expanding it, heaving it forward, and
revitalizing it in ways that no writer has done in more than a
decade."
--Garden & Gun
"Staggering ... even more expansive and layered [than Salvage the
Bones]. A furious brew with hints of Toni Morrison and Homer's "The
Odyssey," Ward's novel hits full stride when Leonie takes her
children and a friend and hits the road to pick up her children's
father, Michael, from prison. On a real and metaphorical road of
secrets and sorrows, the story shifts narrators -- from Jojo to
Leonie to Richie, a doomed boy from his grandfather's fractured
past -- as they crash into both the ghosts that stalk them, as well
as the disquieting ways these characters haunt themselves."
--Boston Globe
"The heart of Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing is story -- the
yearning for a narrative to help us understand ourselves, the pain
of the gaps we'll never fill, the truths that are failed by words
and must be translated through ritual and song .... Ward's writing
throbs with life, grief, and love, and this book is the kind that
makes you ache to return to it."
--Buzzfeed
"The novel is built around an arduous car trip: A black woman and
her two children drive to a prison to pick up their white father.
Ward cleverly uses that itinerant structure to move this family
across the land while keeping them pressed together, hot and
irritated. As soon as they leave the relative safety of their
backwoods farm, the snares and temptations of the outside world
crowd in, threatening to derail their trip or cast them into some
fresh ordeal .... The plight of this one family is now tied to
intersecting crimes and failings that stretch over decades. Looking
out to the yard, Jojo thinks, 'The branches are full. They are full
with ghosts, two or three, all the way up to the top, to the
feathered leaves.' Such is the tree of liberty in this haunted
nation."
--Washington Post
"This book is so good that after you read it, you will want to read
it again."
--Sun Herald
"Very beautiful."
--Vox
"Ward has deservedly been heralded as Faulkner's heir, not only
because of her poetic prose but also due to the difficult subject
matter she delivers to the reader: Making us all look at the U.S.
as one would a fragile, yet wounded beautiful bird in one's hands.
Sing, Unburied, Sing is the author's own take on the American road
novel for the 21st century, with themes such as family -- more
specifically fatherhood -- taking center stage."
--NBC News
"Ward is a visceral writer, her sentences often hitting the reader
like a slap across the face ... Ward tells a sweeping tale about
atonement and forgetting, shame and responsibility, and failure,
sorrow, hatred and acceptance. She does not offer answers. And
maybe there are none. But her vital novel shows that we must heed
the singing of the past, and raise our voices to help those wounds
to heal."
--amNew York
"Ward tells the story of three generations of a struggling
Mississippi family in this astonishing novel ... Their stories are
deeply affecting, in no small part because of Ward's brilliant
writing and compassionate eye."
--Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Ward unearths layers of history in gorgeous textured language,
ending with an unearthly chord."
--BBC
"While the magical element is new in Ward's fiction, her
allusiveness, anchored in her interest in the politics of race, has
been pointing in this direction all along. It takes a touch of the
spiritual to speak across chasms of age, class, and color ... The
signal characteristic of Ward's prose is its lyricism. "I'm a
failed poet," she has said. The length and music of Ward's
sentences owe much to her love of catalogues, extended similes,
imagistic fragments, and emphasis by way of repetition ... The
effect, intensified by use of the present tense, can be hypnotic.
Some chapters sound like fairy tales. This, and her ease with
vernacular language, puts Ward in fellowship with such forebears as
Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner."
--The New Yorker
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