Wednesday, May 27 at 5:30pm @ Off Square Books
“How fortunate we are to be living in the time Jesmyn Ward is writing. On top of an astonishing career – two National Book Awards, youngest recipient of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and a John and Renee Grisham Visiting Writer position here at the University of Mississippi – she now gives us On Witness and Respair. Here a reader will find illuminating essays on Ta-Nehisi Coates, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison and others, replete with penetrating and personal observations rendered artfully: family, tragedy, Mississippi, gratitude, frustration, love, and then some.”
–Richard Howorth
We are delighted to be hosting one of Square Books’ – and Mississippi’s – most beloved writers, the double National Book Award-winning author Jesmyn Ward, on May 27 for an event in support of her new collection of essays, On Witness and Respair. She will be in conversation with Square Books owner Richard Howorth.
Square Books has had the honor of welcoming Jesmyn Ward to the store many times over her career, beginning with her debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds, in 2008. She returned to Oxford just two years later as the John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi in 2010-11. Later that year we were delighted to welcome her back for an event in support of Salvage the Bones, the first of her two novels to have won the National Book Award. She returned again in 2013 for her memoir, Men We Reaped, and again in 2017 for Sing, Unburied, Sing, her second National Book Award-winning novel. Her most recent visit was in 2024 for a sell-out event in support of her fourth novel Let Us Descend.
The event on May 27 will be at Off Square Books, 129 Courthouse Square, Oxford, MS 38655. It will start at 5:30pm. The event is ticketed, and tickets cost $35, including all taxes and fees. Each ticket includes entry for one person, and one signed first edition copy of On Witness and Respair. Tickets can be purchased via Ticket Tailor: https://buytickets.at/squarebooks/2068342 or scan the QR code:
About the book
The collected creative nonfiction of a singular American writer, Jesmyn Ward, including widely shared classics, three never-before-published speeches, and an introductory essay.
Respair (noun, obsolete), fresh hope after despair.
From the two-time National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author Jesmyn Ward, this collection of essays documents more than a decade of work in the life of a singular writer often lauded as “the heir apparent to Toni Morrison” (LitHub). Beginning with her upbringing in a multigenerational household in rural Mississippi, the cradle of both her youth and her gift for storytelling, Ward brings her keen wisdom and hauntingly lyrical prose to a range of topics, following in her grandmother Dorothy’s footsteps when she promises always to “Tell it straight. Tell it all.”
True to her word, in these pages Ward contemplates the writers and novels of her youth and adulthood—the transformative power of discovering Octavia Butler as a twenty-something, the mirror that Richard Wright’s novels held up to her own childhood, and of course, her lifelong love for Toni Morrison. Ward ruminates on her approach to both fiction and life, reflecting on the power of the novel, how to raise a Black son in an era of rising divisiveness and cruelty, as well as her own personal tragedies—including the titular essay of the collection, which tells the story of her partner’s sudden death on the eve of the COVID-19 epidemic. Every bit as piercing and moving as her fiction, On Witness and Respair is a testament to Ward’s powers as “one of America’s finest living writers” (San Francisco Chronicle) and is a monument to hope, beauty, and personal and collective resilience.
About the author
Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, the Strauss Living Prize, and the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. She is the winner of two National Book Awards for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage the Bones. She is also the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds and Let Us Descend, and the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.
On Witness and Respair
By Jesmyn Ward
$29.00
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN: 9781668064269
About the Author
