Jesmyn Ward grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won five Hopwood awards for essays, drama, and fiction. A Stegner Fellow at Stanford, from 2008-2010, she has been named the 2010-11 Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Her debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds, was an Essence Book Club selection, a Black Caucus of the ALA Honor Award recipient, and a finalist for both the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award.
Library of Congress subject headings for this publication:
African American children -- Fiction.
African American teenage girls -- Fiction.
Brothers and sisters -- Fiction.
Motherless families -- Fiction.
African American families -- Mississippi -- Fiction.
Rural poor -- Mississippi -- Fiction.
Hurricane Katrina, 2005 -- Fiction.
Gulf Coast (Miss.) -- Fiction.