Jesmyn Ward, winner of two National Book Awards for her fiction, has a new work of nonfiction coming later this year.
Scribner will publish the acclaimed novelist’s On Witness and Respair: Essays in the spring, the press announced in a news release. Scribner says the book is “the collected creative nonfiction of a singular American writer, Jesmyn Ward, including widely shared classics, three never-before-published speeches, and an introductory essay.”
Ward made her literary debut in 2008 with the novel Where the Line Bleeds, and she followed that up three years later with Salvage the Bones, which won the National Book Award. Her 2017 novel Sing, Unburied, Sing, also won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. Ward was also shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize for her 2023 novel, Let Us Descend.
She is also the author of a memoir, Men We Reaped, published in 2013; the book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Scribner says the title of the collection “comes from the obsolete word ‘respair,’ which means ‘fresh hope after despair.’” In the book, Ward “ruminates on her approach to both fiction and life, reflecting on the power of the novel, how to raise a Black son in an era of rising divisiveness and cruelty, as well as her own personal tragedies—including the titular essay of the collection, which tells the story of her partner’s sudden death on the eve of the Covid-19 epidemic.”
On Witness and Respair is scheduled for publication on May 19.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
