American · b. 1977
Jesmyn Ward won the National Book Award for Fiction twice—for "Salvage the Bones" in 2011 and "Sing, Unburied, Sing" in 2017—joining Faulkner and Roth in that achievement. The American author sets her fiction in rural Mississippi, writing about Black families facing poverty, addiction, and violence with mythic intensity. Ward's prose transforms the Gulf Coast into a landscape as haunted and particular as any in American literature.