{"id":56435,"date":"2018-05-19T22:54:35","date_gmt":"2018-05-19T22:54:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=56435"},"modified":"2018-05-19T22:54:35","modified_gmt":"2018-05-19T22:54:35","slug":"jesmyn-ward-black-girls-are-silenced-misunderstood-and-underestimated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=56435","title":{"rendered":"Jesmyn Ward: ‘Black girls are silenced, misunderstood and underestimated’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jesmyn Ward: ‘Black girls are silenced, misunderstood and underestimated’<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Guardian<\/a>
\n2018-05-11<\/p>\n

Lisa Allardice<\/strong><\/a>, Editor
\nGuardian Review<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"Jesmyn<\/a>
\nJesmyn Ward<\/a>: \u2018I fought from the very beginning.\u2019 Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The author of <\/em>Sing, Unburied, Sing<\/a>, had a tough childhood in Mississippi<\/a>, survived Hurricane Katrina<\/a>, and became the first woman to win two US national book awards for fiction<\/em><\/p>\n

If Jesmyn Ward\u2019s<\/a> fiction tends towards the epic, that is maybe because her life has been marked by monumental events. \u201cI fought from the very beginning\u201d, she says. Born prematurely at just 26 weeks, she was badly attacked by her father\u2019s pit bull<\/a> as a small child, her younger brother was killed at 19, and, along with several generations of her family, she sheltered from Hurricane Katrina<\/a> in a truck. Yet today she is the first woman to win the US national book award<\/a> for fiction twice<\/a>, hailed by a leading reviewer as \u201cone of the most powerfully poetic writers in the country\u201d. And on the morning we meet, it has just been announced that she has been shortlisted for the Women\u2019s prize for fiction<\/a> for her novel Sing, Unburied, Sing<\/em><\/a>…<\/p>\n

Ward\u2019s subject is what it means to be poor and black in America\u2019s rural south, where \u201clife is a hurricane\u201d. Modern Mississippi<\/a>, she says, \u201cmeans addiction, ground-in generational poverty, living very closely with the legacy of slavery, of Jim Crow<\/a>, of lynching and of intractable racism\u201d. In her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds<\/em><\/a> (2008), she felt she \u201cprotected\u201d her characters from these brutal realities, because she knew and cared about them too much: \u201cSo I kept pulling my punches. And later I realised that was a mistake. Life doesn\u2019t spare the kind of people who I write about, so I felt like it would be dishonest to spare my characters in that way.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire interview here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The author of “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” had a tough childhood in Mississippi, survived Hurricane Katrina, and became the first woman to win two US national book awards for fiction<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,24,13743,8,1459,20],"tags":[20138,28680,2103],"class_list":["post-56435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-arts","category-interviews","category-media-archive","category-mississippi","category-usa","tag-jesmyn-ward","tag-lisa-allardice","tag-the-guardian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56435"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56436,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56435\/revisions\/56436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}