Through loss, Jesmyn Ward will always return to the word
Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Timestamps stay in sync with the live audio
A free press is a critical protection for we the people. The NPR network proudly upholds your First Amendment rights with independent journalism that answers only to you. Your support keeps our reporters on the ground holding power to account, and the power to decide what's next for public media is yours. Give at donate.npr.org. This is Fresh Air, I'm Tanya Mosley.
There's a small town in coastal Mississippi called De Lilleal, mostly black, a few thousand people, most of them have lived there for generations. My guest today, writer Jessmine Ward, was raised there, and her family has been there for more than a hundred years, and for the last two decades, she's been writing about it. Her new book is a collection of 22 nonfiction essays that Ward wrote over seventeen years. She wrote the first one in 2008, three years after Hurricane Katrina took her grandmother's house. She wrote the last one in 2025, sitting with the loss of her brother and her partner and her grandmother, going back to the music she had grown up on, because as she writes, it was the only place that still felt like home.
Ward is the first woman and the first black American to win the National Book Award for Fiction twice for her novels Salvage the Bones and Sing Unburied Sing. She is also a MacArthur Fellow. The title of the essay collection is called On Witness and Respair, which is also the title of her 2020 Vanity Fair essay about the death of her spouse and the father of her children. Respair is an English word that was nearly obsolete for a hundred years. It means the recovery of hope after despair.
We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (48 minutes, 6,983 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.
No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.