Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward is an American novelist and professor of English at Tulane University. She won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2011 for Salvage the Bones, a story of a Mississippi family facing Hurricane Katrina, and again in 2017 for Sing, Unburied, Sing. Her first three novels are set in the fictional Mississippi town of Bois Sauvage, and her fourth, Let Us Descend, follows Annis, who is taken shackled from the Carolina coast to a Mississippi sugar plantation near New Orleans.