JESMYN WARD is a professor of creative writing at Tulane University and holds an MFA from the University of Michigan. She is the author of the 2011 National Book Award-winning novels Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, as well as the 2017 National Book Award-winning novel Sing, Unburied, Sing. She is also the editor of The Fire This Time, an anthology of short stories, and the author of Men We Reaped, a memoir that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Ward was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 2008 to 2010. Ward received the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2016. She is a Mississippi resident.