Even before the War on Drugs, black people were imprisoned en masse ever since the time of slavery. The fact that Pop and Richie were in Parchman also highlights the connection between drug use, poverty, racism, and incarceration. Michael is locked up in Parchman, seemingly on charges of possessing and distributing crystal meth. Like many poor people in the South, Michael and Leonie––as well as several other characters in the novel––use drugs as a way of coping with the poverty, racism, violence, and trauma that surrounds them. More broadly, the novel is set in the context of the unfolding drug epidemic in the 20th and 21st century United States, as well as the corresponding “War on Drugs” and era of mass incarceration. The narrative is filled with details of intense, violent, and changeable weather, which has a strong impact on the rural community in which Jojo’s family lives. Ward is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and has won the National Book Award for Fiction twice: first for Salvage the Bones in 2011, and again for Sing, Unburied, Sing in 2017.Īlthough Hurricane Katrina is not mentioned in the novel explicitly, like the book’s ghosts it has a haunting effect on the story. She has published five books, including a collection she edited called The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race, which was published in 2016. Ward has worked at the University of New Orleans, the University of South Alabama, Stanford, and the University of Mississippi, and is currently an associate professor of English at Tulane. Shortly after, Ward’s family home in DeLisle flooded as a result of Hurricane Katrina, an event that had a profound impact on her writing. In 2005 Ward graduated from the University of Michigan with an MFA in Creative Writing. In her 2013 memoir Men We Reaped, Ward reflects on the lives of her younger brother and four other black men from her hometown who died young. In 2000, Ward’s younger brother was killed by a drunk driver. She also gained an MA in Media Studies from Stanford.
A first generation college student, she studied English at Stanford University, graduating in 1999. Jesmyn Ward was born in DeLisle, a rural community in the gulf of Mississippi.
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