Jesmyn Ward

Ward grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi, a rural Gulf Coast community she has never permanently left despite scholarships to Stanford and a Michigan MFA; her brother's death in a hit-and-run accident, and Hurricane Katrina's devastation of her hometown, shape nearly everything she has written since.

Salvage the Bones, set across the twelve days before Katrina hits, won her first National Book Award in 2011; Sing, Unburied, Sing, which sends a family on a road trip haunted literally by the restless dead, won her second in 2017, making her the first woman to win the award twice.

She has cited Faulkner and Toni Morrison as her most direct influences, and now teaches creative writing at Tulane University in New Orleans.