Jesmyn Ward's novel, Salvage the Bones, was little noticed before it was nominated for the National Book Award—and perhaps she anticipated uninterest given her dismay with how the topic of Hurricane Katrina "had receded from public consciousness." That the book extends empathy to a pregnant 14-year-old narrator, her alcoholic father, and the vicious dogfights that animate a poor, black, isolated Mississippi community may also have made it a tough sell.
Those readers who did find Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury USA) encountered a poetic and suspenseful story structured around 12 days of Katrina—10 in which the Batiste family deals with everyday crises while making what few sheltering preparations they can afford, the day of the storm's unfathomable carnage, and the day after.
And when Ward, '99, MA '00, and a former Stegner fellow, won the career-transforming prize, her acceptance speech made her subject matter clear as a Gulf horizon.
Ward, an assistant professor at the University of South Alabama, committed to writing fiction after her 19-year-old brother was killed in an auto accident. "Since living through my grief for my brother meant understanding that life was a feeble, unpredictable thing, I wanted to do something with my time here that would have meaning," she told the audience. "I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South so that the culture that had marginalized us for so long would see that our stories were as universal, our lives as fraught and lovely and important as theirs.
"This is a life's work, and I am only at the beginning."
