Jesmyn Ward

"I know that I could, but it feels very unnatural for me to strip my prose like that, in part because place is so important to me. I feel like in the reading I did when I was growing up, and also in the way that people talk and tell stories here in the South, they use a lot of figurative language. The stories that I heard when I was growing up, and the stories that I read, taught me to use the kind of language that I do. It's hard for me to work against that when I am writing."

"The reason that I like to use classical myths as models is because African American writers and African American stories are usually understood as occurring in some kind of vacuum — because of slavery."

"Place is important to my writing; I believe that if a reader gets a clear picture of the place where a character is from, then they can understand what motivates the character, what limits him or her…"

"But what mires me in pessimism is the fact that so much of life is pain and sorrow and willful ignorance and violence, and pushing back against that tide takes so much effort, so much steady fight. It’s tiring."

"So I kept pulling my punches. And later I realised that was a mistake. Life doesn’t spare the kind of people who I write about, so I felt like it would be dishonest to spare my characters in that way."

"(Any favorite Mississippi or Louisiana authors you’d like to recommend?) There are so many: Ernest Gaines, Natasha Trethewey, Donna Tartt, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker and Robert Olen Butler are just a few I love."

"(Which writers – novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets – working today do you admire most?) there are so many: Jacqueline Woodson; Colson Whitehead; Celeste Ng; Natalie Bakopoulos; Justin St. Germain; Molly Antopol; J. M. Tyree; Michael McGriff; Quan Barry; Kevin Young; Jericho Brown; Clint Smith; Daniel José Older; and Kima Jones are a few."

"I read everything. When I say everything, I read everything: children’s literature, Y.A., science fiction, fantasy, romance — I read it all. Each genre fulfills a different need I have. Each book teaches me something."

"What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?) This is when I became a reading glutton. I loitered in the library and picked books off the shelf by random. I read a lot of British children’s literature by accident — “The Secret Garden”; “A Little Princess”; “Five Children and It”; the Narnia series, etc. — so much so that I confused American spellings and British spellings until I was in high school. I also read a ton of books about witches. If the word “witch” or the name of a witch was in the title, I read it: “The Witch Family”; “Little Witch”; “The Witch of Blackbird Pond”; and “Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth.” And finally, I found myself drawn to books about independent girls: “Harriet the Spy”; “Island of the Blue Dolphins”; “Julie of the Wolves”; “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler”; “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry”; the “Pippi Longstocking” books; and the “Anne of Green Gables” series are a few. I still think about those heroines all the time. Reading about them helped me to discover the kind of person I wanted to be."

"(What’s the last great book you read?) “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of America Capitalism,” by Edward E. Baptist. It taught me so much about slavery and how slavery enabled America to become America. Every time I left my house after reading it, I saw the world differently. I saw the legacy of human misery underpinning it all...(If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?) “The Half Has Never Been Told.” It’s an essential book for anyone who seeks to understand the America we live in now."

"(What books or authors have most inspired you? What books did you read while working on Ordinary Girls?) JD: Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped, for starters. It felt like she was speaking to me...also, I think of Jesmyn Ward as one of the best thinkers and sentence stylists working right now."