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Winner of the National Book Award
A New York Times bestseller
A majestic, stirring novel from two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward following a family on a journey through Mississippi—now in a gorgeous new package designed for the modern reader.
Jesmyn Ward brings the archetypal road novel into rural 21st-century America in this intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. When thirteen-year-old Jojo’s father is released from prison, his mother packs the family into a car and drives north to Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary at the heart of Mississippi. At Parchman, Jojo encounters another thirteen-year-old boy, a specter who wanders the prison and carries with him the ugly history of the South—and a resounding lesson for Jojo about fathers and sons, legacies, violence, and love.
Sing, Unburied, Sing journeys through Mississippi’s past and present, delivering an enduring, exquisite portrait of the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and how they both gnarl, and strengthen, family bonds.
Jesmyn Ward
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 to 2010, Ward had a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. She was the John and Renée 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.
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