Jesmyn Ward for On Witness and Respair

Overview

**This is a ticketed event. Each attendee must purchase a ticket to gain entry. Tickets cost $35 and include entry for one person, and one signed first edition copy of On Witness and Respair . All tickets must be bought online . They are not for sale in-store**

Join us as we welcome Jesmyn Ward for On Witness and Respair, the highly anticipated new collection of essays from the two-time National Book Award winner.

About the book

"Leave it to one of our greatest living writers, Jesmyn Ward, to bring back a word from the 1500s and give it fresh meaning in the title of her forthcoming book: respair, or 'fresh hope after despair.' Known for her moving and award-winning fiction, this collection of essays gives readers a sense of the powerful Southern woman behind the unforgettable stories."

--Garden & Gun

The collected creative nonfiction of a singular American writer, Jesmyn Ward, including widely shared classics, three never-before-published speeches, and an introductory essay.

Respair (noun, obsolete), fresh hope after despair.

From the two-time National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author Jesmyn Ward, this collection of essays documents more than a decade of work in the life of a singular writer often lauded as "the heir apparent to Toni Morrison" ( LitHub). Beginning with her upbringing in a multigenerational household in rural Mississippi, the cradle of both her youth and her gift for storytelling, Ward brings her keen wisdom and hauntingly lyrical prose to a range of topics, following in her grandmother Dorothy's footsteps when she promises always to "Tell it straight. Tell it all."

True to her word, in these pages Ward contemplates the writers and novels of her youth and adulthood--the transformative power of discovering Octavia Butler as a twenty-something, the mirror that Richard Wright's novels held up to her own childhood, and of course, her lifelong love for Toni Morrison. Ward ruminates on her approach to both fiction and life, reflecting on the power of the novel, how to raise a Black son in an era of rising divisiveness and cruelty, as well as her own personal tragedies--including the titular essay of the collection, which tells the story of her partner's sudden death on the eve of the COVID-19 epidemic. Every bit as piercing and moving as her fiction, On Witness and Respair is a testament to Ward's powers as "one of America's finest living writers" ( San Francisco Chronicle) and is a monument to hope, beauty, and personal and collective resilience.

About the author

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, the Strauss Living Prize, and the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. She is the winner of two National Book Awards for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage the Bones. She is also the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds and the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.