Jesmyn Ward
In her fourth novel, Let Us Descend, the main character Annis perhaps inhabits an earlier Bois Sauvage when she is taken shackled from the Carolina coast and put to work on a Mississippi sugar plantation near New Orleans.[3] With their house in DeLisle flooding rapidly, the Ward family set out in their car to get to a local church, but ended up stranded in a field full of tractors.Empathizing with the struggle of the survivors and coming to terms with her own experience during the storm, Ward was unable to write creatively for three years – the time it took her to find a publisher for her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds.[11] The novel was picked as a book club selection by Essence magazine[10] and received a Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA) Honor Award in 2009.[15] Starting on the day twin protagonists Joshua and Christophe DeLisle graduate from high school,[16] Where the Line Bleeds follows the brothers as their choices pull them in opposite directions.[17] Unwilling to leave the small rural town on the Mississippi Coast where they were raised by their loving grandmother, the twins struggle to find work, with Joshua eventually becoming a dock hand and Christophe joining his drug-dealing cousin.[17] In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called Ward "a fresh new voice in American literature" who "unflinchingly describes a world full of despair but not devoid of hope.[22] Explaining her main character's fascination with the Greek mythological figure of Medea, Ward told Elizabeth Hoover of The Paris Review: "It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as 'other'.… If one day, … they're able to pick up my work and read it and see … the characters in my books as human beings and feel for them, then I think that that is a political act", Ward stated in a television interview with Anna Bressanin of BBC News on December 22, 2011.Contributors to The Fire This Time include Carol Anderson, Jericho Brown, Garnett Cadogan, Edwidge Danticat, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Mitchell S. Jackson, Honoree Jeffers, Kima Jones, Kiese Laymon, Daniel José Older, Emily Raboteau, Claudia Rankine, Clint Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Wendy S. Walters, Isabel Wilkerson, Kevin Young, and Jesmyn Ward herself.