Author Guide · Literary Fiction & Memoir
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When Hurricane Katrina reached DeLisle, Mississippi, in August 2005, Jesmyn Ward was home visiting, newly finished with her MFA. The family left her grandmother’s flooding house and waited out the storm in their trucks in a field. Five years earlier her younger brother Joshua had been killed by a drunk driver, and she has said she became a writer partly for him. She turned that coast into Bois Sauvage, the fictional town of three of her four novels, and in 2017 became the first woman to win the National Book Award for Fiction twice. This guide covers her eight key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 8 key books · 2008–2026 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Jesmyn Ward has published four novels, from Where the Line Bleeds (2008) to Let Us Descend (2023), plus a memoir, an essay collection, an anthology she edited and a short book of advice. The best known are Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Salvage the Bones (2011), both National Book Award winners, and the memoir Men We Reaped (2013). Start with Sing, Unburied, Sing. Below are all eight in order, with what each one is about.
Where to Start with Jesmyn Ward
If you want her defining novel
→ Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) — a road trip to Parchman prison, with ghosts.
If you want the Katrina novel
→ Salvage the Bones (2011) — twelve days before the storm, in one family.
If you want her own story
→ Men We Reaped (2013) — five young men she lost in four years.
If you want historical fiction
→ Let Us Descend (2023) — an enslaved girl marched south to New Orleans.
8 Jesmyn Ward Books, in Order
Where the Line Bleeds
Her first novel. Twin brothers Joshua and Christophe, raised by their blind grandmother, have just finished high school on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and have few ways to earn a living; their paths split between steady work and dealing drugs. Ward struggled to find a publisher before the small press Agate took it. It was a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.
Salvage the Bones
Over the twelve days before Hurricane Katrina, Esch Batiste, fourteen and secretly pregnant, narrates life in Bois Sauvage with her three brothers and their hard-drinking father, while her brother Skeetah’s pit bull, China, gives birth to puppies. Esch is reading the myth of Medea at school, and the novel builds towards the storm itself. It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2011.
Men We Reaped
A memoir of five young Black men from her community who died between 2000 and 2004: Roger, Demond, her cousin C.J., Ronald, and her brother Joshua, killed by a drunk driver. Ward tells their deaths in reverse order alongside her own family’s history. The title comes from Harriet Tubman. It won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The Fire This Time
Taking James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) as its starting point, Ward gathered eighteen essays and poems on race in America, ten of them new, from writers including Isabel Wilkerson, Claudia Rankine, Edwidge Danticat, Natasha Trethewey and Kiese Laymon. The book is divided into three parts: past, present and future.
Sing, Unburied, Sing
Thirteen-year-old Jojo, his little sister Kayla and their mother Leonie drive across Mississippi to Parchman prison to collect the children’s white father, Michael, while Jojo’s grandmother is dying of cancer at home. The ghost of Richie, a boy his grandfather knew at Parchman, follows them back. It won the National Book Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Navigate Your Stars
A short gift book of the commencement speech she gave at Tulane University in 2018, with illustrations by Gina Triplett. She writes about hard work, family and the obstacles she met as a first-generation college student from rural Mississippi.
Let Us Descend
Annis, an enslaved girl on a Carolina rice plantation and the daughter of the man who enslaves her, is sold and marched south to the slave market in New Orleans and then to a Louisiana sugar plantation. A spirit that takes her grandmother’s name, Aza, travels with her, and the title echoes Dante’s Inferno. It was Oprah’s 103rd Book Club pick and a Kirkus Prize finalist.
On Witness and Respair
Her first essay collection gathers more than a decade of nonfiction, three previously unpublished speeches and a new introduction: on growing up in a multigenerational house in rural Mississippi, the books that formed her, and raising a Black son. The title essay, first published in Vanity Fair in 2020, is about the death of her partner at the start of the pandemic.
In What Order to Read Jesmyn Ward
None of Ward’s novels is a sequel, so you can read them in any order. Three of them, Where the Line Bleeds, Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing, are set in or around Bois Sauvage, her fictional version of DeLisle on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and reading them in order shows the town over roughly a decade. Let Us Descend leaves it for the slavery-era South.
Men We Reaped is the key to the fiction: the deaths it records, above all her brother’s, sit under much of what she has written since. Read it after one of the novels, then the essays in On Witness and Respair, which carry the same story on to her own losses in 2020.
A reading path
1. Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017)
2. Salvage the Bones (2011)
3. Men We Reaped (2013)
4. Let Us Descend (2023)
5. On Witness and Respair (2026)
The years · 1977–2026
Quick facts about Jesmyn Ward
- Known for
- Novels and a memoir about poor Black families on the Mississippi Gulf Coast that won her the National Book Award for Fiction twice.
- 1977
- Born in Berkeley, California; raised in DeLisle, Mississippi
- 2005
- Hurricane Katrina hits her family in DeLisle
- 2011
- Salvage the Bones wins the National Book Award
- 2026
- On Witness and Respair, her essays
- Born
- 1 April 1977, Berkeley, California; her family moved back to DeLisle, Mississippi, when she was three
- Education
- Stanford University, BA in English (1999) and MA (2000); University of Michigan, MFA (2005); first in her family to go to college
- Teaching
- Tulane University since 2014, where she holds the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities
- Family
- Her brother Joshua was killed by a drunk driver in 2000; her partner, Brandon Miller, died in January 2020; she has three children and lives in Mississippi
- Prizes
- National Book Award for Fiction (2011, 2017); MacArthur Fellowship (2017); Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction (2022), its youngest winner, at 45
- Recognition
- Time 100 (2018); three books on The New York Times’ 2024 list of the 100 best books of the 21st century
The red mark is 2017: Sing, Unburied, Sing, her second National Book Award, which made her the first woman to win the fiction prize twice.
How Jesmyn Ward Writes: Bois Sauvage
Ward writes about one place. Bois Sauvage, French for “wild wood”, is her fictional DeLisle, the town on the Mississippi Gulf Coast where her family has lived for generations, and she has named Faulkner as a major influence: a writer who made his own corner of Mississippi, and its poor, the centre of his fiction. Her subjects are the ones she sees around her: poverty, drugs, prison, the lack of decent health care, and young men who die early.
Her narrators speak in the dialect of the coast but think in a richer, more formal language, a gap she has said she took from Faulkner and kept even when early readers found it too wide. She also reaches for old stories. Esch reads Medea in Salvage the Bones; Let Us Descend takes its title and its shape from Dante’s Inferno; and in Sing, Unburied, Sing and Let Us Descend the dead and the spirits are as present as the living.
Under all of it lies grief. She has said she started writing partly for her brother Joshua, who died in 2000, and Katrina “silenced” her for a while after 2005. Men We Reaped names the dead directly, and On Witness and Respair carries the same work on to the death of her partner in 2020.
Watch
Jesmyn Ward answers readers’ questions
In January 2018 Ward talks with Jeffrey Brown of PBS NewsHour and answers readers’ questions about Sing, Unburied, Sing, the first pick of the NewsHour and New York Times book club Now Read This.
Frequently asked questions about Jesmyn Ward’s books
How many books has Jesmyn Ward written?
Eight, all listed on this page: four novels (Where the Line Bleeds, Salvage the Bones, Sing, Unburied, Sing and Let Us Descend), the memoir Men We Reaped, the essay collection On Witness and Respair, the anthology she edited, The Fire This Time, and the short illustrated book Navigate Your Stars, based on a commencement speech.
What are Jesmyn Ward’s books in order?
Where the Line Bleeds (2008), Salvage the Bones (2011), Men We Reaped (2013), The Fire This Time (2016), Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), Navigate Your Stars (2020), Let Us Descend (2023) and On Witness and Respair (2026).
Where should I start with Jesmyn Ward?
With Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017): a family road trip to Parchman prison that shows her whole range, from the realism of rural Mississippi to its ghosts. If you would rather begin with the Katrina novel, read Salvage the Bones; if you prefer nonfiction, Men We Reaped.
What is Jesmyn Ward’s most famous book?
Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). It won the National Book Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and in 2024 The New York Times placed it 30th on its list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. Salvage the Bones (33rd) and Men We Reaped (97th) are on the same list.
Has Jesmyn Ward won the National Book Award twice?
Yes: for Salvage the Bones in 2011 and Sing, Unburied, Sing in 2017. She was the first woman, and the first Black American, to win the fiction award twice. She also received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017 and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2022.
Are Jesmyn Ward’s novels connected?
Not as a series. Where the Line Bleeds, Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing share a place, Bois Sauvage, her fictional version of her hometown DeLisle, Mississippi, but each has its own characters and stands alone. Let Us Descend is set in the slavery-era South, in the Carolinas and Louisiana.
What is Men We Reaped about?
Five young Black men from Ward’s community who died between 2000 and 2004, among them her cousin C.J. and her younger brother Joshua, who was killed by a drunk driver. She tells their stories in reverse order of their deaths, alongside her family’s history. It won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for nonfiction.
Why was Salvage the Bones challenged in schools?
In Guilford County, North Carolina, a parent challenged the novel as an optional read in a 12th-grade Advanced Placement English class at Northern Guilford High School; some parents objected to its sexual content. School and district committees kept the book, and on 29 November 2022 the Board of Education voted 6–2 to keep it available.
Is Let Us Descend an Oprah’s Book Club pick?
Yes. In October 2023, the month it was published, Oprah Winfrey chose Let Us Descend as her 103rd Book Club pick. It follows Annis, an enslaved girl, from a Carolina rice plantation to New Orleans.
Is Jesmyn Ward still alive, and what is her newest book?
Yes. She was born on 1 April 1977, lives in Mississippi and teaches at Tulane University in New Orleans. Her newest book is On Witness and Respair (2026), a collection of essays and speeches; a new novel is under contract with her publisher, Scribner.
Footnotes
- Jesmyn Ward — Wikipedia
- Men We Reaped — Wikipedia
- Jesmyn Ward’s ‘Sing, Unburied, Sing’ is a ghost story about the real struggles of living — PBS NewsHour, 2017
- Jesmyn Ward, winner of the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction — Library of Congress
- Oprah’s Book Club Pick: Let Us Descend — Shelf Awareness, 2023
- On Witness and Respair — Simon & Schuster
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all hers.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“I think that when you see yourself reflected in literature, that it enlarges your ideas of what is possible for you.”
— Jesmyn Ward, interviewed by Jeffrey Brown, PBS NewsHour (2017)
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