Grief, reading and a Mississippi childhood run through nearly two decades of Jesmyn Ward's nonfiction. This book gathers her essays, introductions, a profile and speeches in one place.
Readical Key Points
- Collected nonfiction written between 2008 and 2025, with an introductory essay and three speeches not published before
- Subjects include her upbringing in rural Mississippi, the writers who shaped her, including Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, raising a Black son, and the filmmaker Ava DuVernay
- Content note: writes directly about grief, including the deaths of her brother and her partner, and about racism
- Starred reviews from Booklist and Kirkus Reviews
- Hardcover, 256 pages, Scribner, 2026
Ward writes about the books that found her, from Richard Wright's novels in childhood to Octavia Butler in her twenties, and about what a novel can do. Other pieces return to family: the crowded family house she grew up in, her brother's death in 2000, the sudden loss of her partner just before the COVID-19 pandemic in the title essay, and the vigilance of raising a son. Profiles of Ava DuVernay and Ta-Nehisi Coates sit alongside them.
The pieces are not arranged by date, so the book reads well straight through or a few essays at a time. It serves readers of Ward's fiction and memoir, and students of Southern and African American literature. Its title borrows an obsolete word for hope that comes after despair.
About the Author
Jesmyn Ward won the National Book Award for Fiction twice, for Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). Her honors include a MacArthur Fellowship and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction (2022), and her memoir Men We Reaped was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.
Condition: Brand New and Readical Ready.
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