Through loss, Jesmyn Ward will always return to the word
5/19/202645 min
Jesmyn Ward learned the term "respair" — the recovery of hope after despair — in 2020, shortly after her partner died suddenly. Her new book, ‘On Witness and Respair,’ is an essay collection on grief, motherhood and survival. She spoke with Tonya Mosley about writing through painful things and why she returned to her native Mississippi. Her previous National Book Award-winning novels are ‘Sing, Unburied, Sing’ and ‘Salvage the Bones.’
Also, jazz critic Martin Johnson reviews an album from Tomeka Reid.
See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
This message comes from Comcast. Comcast is delivering extraordinary live sports experiences, so fans catch every game-changing moment faster, smoother, and closer to live than ever before. Learn more at comcastcorporation.com/sports.
Tonya Mosley· Host0:16
This is Fresh Air. I'm Tonya Mosley. There's a small town in coastal Mississippi called DeLisle. Mostly Black, a few thousand people. Most of them have lived there for generations. My guest today, writer Jesmyn Ward, was raised there, and her family has been there for more than 100 years. And for the last two decades, she's been writing about it. Her new book is a collection of 22 nonfiction essays that Ward wrote over 17 years. She wrote the first one in 2008, three years after Hurricane Katrina took her grandmother's house. She wrote the last one in 2025, sitting with the loss of her brother and her partner and her grandmother, going back to the music she had grown up on because, as she writes, "It was the only place that still felt like home." Ward is the first woman and the first Black American to win the National Book Award for Fiction twice for her novels Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing. She is also a MacArthur Fellow. The title of the essay collection is called On Witness and Respair, which is also the title of her 2020 Vanity Fair essay about the death of her spouse and the father