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CREATED:20130923T234000Z
DESCRIPTION:The "supremely gifted novelist" of Salvage the Bones on place, race, and 
 poverty\n\n“We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard 
 the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling 
 and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it 
 was dead men that we reaped.” —Harriet Tubman\n\nIn five years, Jesmyn 
 Ward lost five young men in her life -- to drugs, accidents, suicide, and 
 the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black 
 men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the 
 question: Why? And as she began to write about the experience of living 
 through all the dying, she realized the truth -- and it took her breath 
 away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and 
 where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and 
 economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of 
 family and relationships. Jesmyn says the answer was so obvious she felt 
 stupid for not seeing it. But it nagged at her until she knew she had to 
 write about her community, to write their stories and her own. \n\nJesmyn 
 grew up in poverty in rural Mississippi. She writes powerfully about the 
 pressures this brings, on the men who can do no right and the women who 
 stand in for family in a society where the men are often absent. She 
 bravely tells her story, revisiting the agonizing losses of her only 
 brother and her friends. As the sole member of her family to leave home and 
 pursue higher education, she writes about this parallel American universe 
 with the objectivity distance provides and the intimacy of utter 
 familiarity. A brutal world rendered beautifully, Jesmyn Ward’s memoir 
 will sit comfortably alongside Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I'm Dying, 
 Tobias Wolff's This Boy’s Life, and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged 
 Bird Sings.\n"Jesmyn Ward left her Gulf Coast home for education and 
 experience, but it called her back. It called on her in most painful ways, 
 to mourn. In Men We Reaped, Jesmyn unburies her dead, that they may live 
 again. And through this emotional excavation, she forces us to see the 
 problems of place and race that led these men to their early graves. Full 
 of beauty, love, and dignity, Men We Reaped is a haunting and essential 
 read."\n –Natasha Trethewey, US Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize 
 winner\n"Jesmyn Ward is simply sui generis. I am reminded of Miles Davis’ 
 quote: ‘Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there,’ after 
 reading her memoir, Men We Reaped.This is one mighty virtuosic, bluesy 
 hymn. Beautiful."  \n-- Oscar Hijuelos, author of Thoughts without 
 Cigarettes\nLos Angeles Times Book Review\n 
 http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-0908-jesmyn-ward-20130908,0,926641.story?track=rss\nColorlines\nhttp://colorlines.com/archives/2013/09/jesmyn_ward_on_love_and_loss_of_black_men.html\n\nTimes 
 Picayune\nhttp://www.nola.com/books/index.ssf/2013/09/jesymn_ward_talks_about_racism.html\n\nJesmyn 
 Ward grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi. She received her MFA from the 
 University of Michigan and has been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and a 
 Grisham Visiting Writer in Residence at the Univ. of Mississippi. She is 
 currently an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of 
 South Alabama. She is the author of the novels Where the Line Bleeds and 
 Salvage the Bones, for which she won the 2011 National Book Award, and was 
 a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions Literary Award and the Dayton Literary 
 Peace Prize, as well as a nominee for the IMPAC Dublin Literary 
 Award.\n\n7:30 PM at the Hillside Club (2286 Cedar Street, 
 Berkeley)\nTickets: $12 general, $8 students; $15 at the door\nBrown Paper 
 Tickets online or 800-838-3006\n\n 
 https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2013/09/23/18743706.php
SUMMARY:National Book Award Winner JESMYN WARD on The Men We Reaped
LOCATION:Hillside Club\n2286 Cedar Street\nBerkeley CA 94709
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2013/09/23/18743706.php
DTSTART:20131009T023000Z
DTEND:20131009T040000Z
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