2018 Time’s 100 Most Influential People, author Jesymn Ward, gave a public presentation at the College of Arts and Sciences on April 20.
Ward is the author of “Salvage the Bones” and “Sing, Unburied, Sing” and the first woman and person of color to win the National Book Award for fiction twice
“This is what college is about and what UW tries to provide for all our students,” Peter Parolin, Dean of the Honors College, said. “To have them meet with amazing, transformative guests, to see what is possible to do and be in this world and for us in turn to share a little bit of Wyoming with guests whose accomplishments we admire.”
The presentation consisted of what Ward calls “bad faith narratives” and what experiences in her life and what she has accomplished through her works to defy these narratives.
“I have been hearing these stories, stories that purported to tell me who I am and what I am capable of, from the moment that I was born,” Ward said. “But now I realized I’d heard snippets, small mumblings, of my own inner voice that contradicted the world’s narrative about me and my people.”
Assistant Professor Nina McConigley had the opportunity to introduce Ward to the stage.
At this time, McConigley highlighted not only the Honors College use of Ward’s work “Salvage the Bones” in the second half of their Colloquium II course ‘What does it mean to be human?’ but what professors learned from teaching with these materials.
McConigley wrote to the professors within the Honors college for responses to Ward’s work, prompting a response from Breezy Taggart, an Assistant Lecturer at the Honors College.
“I think that this text gets at so many aspects of being human,” Taggart wrote. “It’s a great culminating tale as it addresses issue of poverty, discrimination, crisis, environmental disaster, and inequality, but also it fleshes out the power of familial bonds, community, heritage, place, and survival.”
Honors College students also had the unique opportunity to have lunch with Ward and learn about the personal experiences that drive her creative passion.
One student asked about the literal influences Ward has put into her novels.
“Of course my experience in Hurricane Katrina influenced everything in Salvage the Bones,” Ward said. “Writers sort of mime their lives, even if it isn’t straightforward.”
Ward then recounted her experiences of the natural disaster.
Ward had recently graduated from the University of Michigan and was supposed to return for a teaching position when news of the hurricane struck.
“I thought, if I leave I’ll be worried sick about what’s going on at home with my family,” Ward said. “A lot of what occurred to the characters, what they experienced in the aftermath too like going to the town closer to the Gulf of Mexico seeing that it was flattened, that was what my family experienced too.”
Salvage the Bones helped Ward win her first award in 2011.
Another question posed to the author asked what her opinion is on people who avoid the conversation of race and history in the modern era.
“This doesn’t just affect one group,” Ward said. “So to push back against that faction of people who want to erase the past helps us understand that we are all tied together.”
Ward then into the detailed research she did about Parchman Prison for her novel “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” which won her second award in 2017 and focuses on untold history of Mississippi slavery, poverty, and racism.
