The Fire This Time

A harrowing yet hopeful book about race * Observer * A stirring anthology that takes more cues from Baldwin than just its title ... Every poem and essay in Wards volume remains grounded in a harsh reality * New York Review of Books * Mixing anecdote, humour, passion, fear, anger and a call to arms, its a powerful read -- Unmissable Books to Read this Spring * Stylist * Powerful ... Alive with purpose, conviction and intellect * New York Times * To Baldwins call we now have a choral response one that should be read by every one of us committed to the cause of equality and freedom -- Jelani Cobb, Professor of Journalism at Columbia University This is a book to pick up and tuck under our hearts to see what we can build -- Nikki Giovanni, poet With this gorgeous chorus - Ward has done the same [as her ancestors]: she has created a world, a space, the one she, herself, was seeking. A new type of belonging, a new place to belong, is exactly what she has given us * LA Review of Books * This is a book that seeks to place the shock of our own times into historical context and, most importantly, to move these times forward * Vogue *

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University. She is the author of the novels Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, which won the 2011 National Book Award, and Sing, Unburied, Sing, which won the 2017 National Book Award. She is also the editor of the anthology The Fire This Time and the author of the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. From 2008-2010, Ward had a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. She was the John and Rene Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi for the 2010-2011 academic year. In 2016, the American Academy of Arts and Letters selected Ward for the Strauss Living Award. She lives in Mississippi.