Quotes from Jesmyn Ward

It's impossible for most black Americans to construct full family trees. Official census records, used by so many genealogy enthusiasts to piece together their families' pasts, don't include our non-European ancestors.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

It took me a long time to write again because Katrina destroyed the home I loved, and that robbed me of hope.

On one hand, I can say, you know, I had many family members - I had many people in my extended family who left right after Katrina, who relocated to different cities, right? Houston, Atlanta. Right? Most of them have come back.

Young people have a right to optimism, and rightly so; human beings have grown and developed and accomplished wonderful feats in the world. But what mires me in pessimism is the fact that so much of life is pain and sorrow and willful ignorance and violence, and pushing back against that tide takes so much effort, so much steady fight. It's tiring.

History and socio-economic inequality and all those things had, like, borne down upon my family and my community and really sort of narrowed our choices.

I was pleasantly surprised with 'Salvage.' I went to Australia and New Zealand for the novel and met a lot of people who had experienced the earthquakes in Christchurch. They responded very strongly to the book because they had been through these natural disasters and were trying to figure out how to rebuild.

When I was a teenager, I was the only black girl at a small, private Episcopal school, where my tuition was paid by the family my mother worked for. It was hard being the only one, and I faced a fair amount of racist and classist bullying there.

That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.

I live in the South; there are Confederate flags everywhere.

I've always used Southern rappers in epigraphs for my novels. For 'Sing, Unburied, Sing,' I wanted to use Big K.R.I.T. - because I have so much respect for the lyrical depth of their music.

Did every step feel like the running leap a bird takes before flight?

In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.

The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.

On one hand, I am very pessimistic, but on the other hand, if I didn't believe that speaking up would do something, I wouldn't have spoken.

People ask me all the time, 'Why did I move home?' As well as I can articulate it, that's why. I moved home because I love the community that I come from.

It's always hard for a writer to make herself into a character; I had to figure out what my defining characteristics were, and that's something I had to work through multiple drafts to figure out.

At every turn, Molly Antopol's gorgeous debut story collection, 'The UnAmericans,' is firing on multiple cylinders.

My time in New York really clarified things for me. I thought, 'What could I do with my life that would give it meaning?' And writing was that for me.

Biblical myth is as integral to the spirit of the South as the heat and humidity.

Even though I read voraciously as a child, I never saw myself in books. Without narratives to expand my ideas of who I could be, I accepted the stories others told me about myself, stories which diminished and belittled me and people like me. I want to write against that.

'The UnAmericans' is a compassionate and brilliantly rendered debut - and for a book set largely in the past, these stories feel essential to understanding the contemporary world in which we live.

I thought about all those people whose suffering had been erased, and I thought, 'Why can't they speak? Why can't I undo some of that erasure?'

Faulkner's characters, too, were uneducated. They were deprived, but they were allowed to have very rich inner lives. I want to advocate for that, for inner lives that are much more complicated and more poetic than we think.