Our February reading group selection is Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, the winner of the National Book Award for Fiction in 2017. The reading group will meet Wednesday, February 28 at 7 pm online via Zoom. The Zoom link will be sent on the afternoon of the meeting to anyone interested in attending. Email bookbeatorders@gmail.com to sign up. Books are in stock now and discounted 15%. The Book Beat reading group is free and open to the public. Please call (248) 968-1190 for more information.
“The connection between the injustices of the past and the desperation of present are clearly drawn in Sing, Unburied, Sing, a book that charts the lines between the living and the dead, the loving and the broken. I am a huge fan of Jesmyn Ward’s work, and this book proves that she is one of the most important writers in America today.”
–Ann Patchett, author of Commonwealth
“Sing, Unburied, Sing is many things: a road novel, a slender epic of three generations and the ghosts that haunt them, and a portrait of what ordinary folk in dire circumstances cleave to as well as what they — and perhaps we all — are trying to outrun.”
— Tracy K. Smith (Poet Laureate of the United States), New York Times Book Review
The writer Jesmyn Ward (USA), Pass Christian, Mississippi, April 3, 2023. Photograph © Beowulf Sheehan
Jesmyn Ward was born in 1977 in DeLisle, Mississippi. Her mother’s employer paid for her to attend a private school after she was bullied by black students at a public school. She earned a BA at Stanford University in 1999 and a Master’s degree in 2000. Ward earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan in 2005.
Her first book Where the Line Bleeds was written to remember her younger brother, who was killed by a drunk driver. She was the winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2012 Alex Award for her second novel Salvage the Bones.
She currently teaches at Tulane University, but previously was an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama. She had a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University (2010 to 2011) and a John and Renee Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi for 2014.
She is the recipient of Tulane’s Paul and Debra Gibbons Professorship and also works closely with the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South and the Newcomb College Institute.
In 2017, she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Genius grant. She has now won the National Book Award twice. Ward’s novel Sing, Unburied, Sing was awarded a National Book Award for fiction in November of 2017. Her book Navigate Your Stars is based on her life.
In January, 2020, Ward’s 33-year-old husband died of the coronavirus. Her article in Vanity Fair in September, 2020, expresses her heartbreak.