ON WITNESS AND RESPAIR

Bearing witness to injustice.

MacArthur Fellow and winner of multiple literary awards, Ward gathers 23 essays, introductions, and lectures, from 2008 to 2025, on books, writing, and the pain she carries as a Black woman. She grew up in Mississippi, so poor that she often went hungry. Books sustained her: stories about “stubborn, smart, underdog girls who fought against a world that constantly devalued them and their place in it.” Certainly the stories her parents and grandparents told her conveyed a visceral sense of that world, where Black lives “have the same value as a plow horse or a grizzled donkey.” “I have only recently begun to realize,” she admits, “that my becoming a writer has been a continual search for a voice to speak against that damning statement of worthlessness that has been a constant in my life.” Although Ward has lived in the East, West, and Midwest, she returned to Mississippi, to the community where her family still lives and where, in 2000, her brother was killed by a drunk driver. The driver was never held accountable for the crime—only for leaving the scene of an accident, for which he got a minimal sentence. Mourning the fate of other Black men, she hopes her son never will be “in the wrong time at the wrong place on the wrong end of a weapon.” Among Ward’s essays are reflections on writers she admires: Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Ntozake Shange, among others; a warm profile of Ta-Nehisi Coates; and a tribute to Ava DuVernay, whose films “invert the tradition of the dehumanization of Black people and the Black body in the media.” In her own writing, as well, she aims to “assert my own humanity and the humanity of those I love.”

A stirring collection.