Jesmyn Ward was born in 1977 in Berkeley, California but moved to DeLisle, Mississippi, at the age of three. The first in her family to attend college, she received a B.A. (1999) and M.A. (2000) from Stanford University and an M.F.A. (2005) from the University of Michigan. Currently an associate professor in the Department of English at Tulane University,  Ward was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 2008 to 2010, the Grisham-Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi from 2010 to 2011, and an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of South Alabama from 2011 to 2014. 

A 2017 MacArthur Fellow, she is described on their website as "a fiction writer exploring the bonds of community and familial love among poor African Americans in the rural South. She is the author of three novels and a memoir, all set in the Gulf Coast region of her native Mississippi and centered on marginalized black communities. In prose that is simultaneously luminous and achingly honest, Ward captures moments of beauty, tenderness, and resilience against a bleak landscape of crushing poverty, racism, addiction, and incarceration. In her novels and nonfiction accounts of her own experiences with loss and injustice, Ward is offering a raw and powerful portrayal of the circumscribed possibilities and lost potential faced by many African Americans after generations of racial and economic inequality."

Ward lives in Mississippi and has two children. Her husband, Brandon R. Miller, died in January 2020 of an acute respiratory distress syndrome at the age of 33.  Learn much more about Ward's life in this NPR All Things Considered program (August 31, 2017) here.