Jesmyn Ward - by Sheri-Marie Harrison & Arin Keeble & Maria Elena Torres-Quevedo

About the Book

The first substantial and focused critical study of Jesmyn Ward, now one of the most widely read, taught and studied contemporary authors.

Book Synopsis

This collection of essays provides a thorough and probing account of an author who is quickly becoming one of the most read, studied and taught contemporary writers, but whose work remains underrepresented in scholarship. It is broad and ambitious in scope, mirroring the richness of Ward's oeuvre, and it brings together a diverse and dynamic range of approaches that reflect the scholarly conversations in which Ward is embedded.

From the Back Cover

The first book-length study on the writings of two-time National Book Award-winning author Jesmyn Ward This collection of essays provides a comprehensive account of an author who is quickly becoming one of the most read, studied and taught contemporary writers. Ward's treatment of contemporary Black life in the US and her commitment to community and care through the exploration of historical and present-day violence resonates in other Black and marginalised communities the world over and is central to what makes Ward an urgent, critically important voice in contemporary literary studies. This volume responds to the depth and resonance of Ward's writing, which to date includes three novels, a memoir, an edited collection of essays and a set of personal essays. It is broad and ambitious in scope, mirroring the richness of Ward's oeuvre, and it brings together a diverse and dynamic range of approaches that reflect the scholarly conversations in which Ward is embedded. Sheri-Marie Harrison is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri. Arin Keeble is a Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at Edinburgh Napier University. Maria Elena Torres-Quevedo is a trade union organiser based in Edinburgh.

Review Quotes

Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays greatly expands the field of literary crit-icism as well as the existing scholarship on Ward's works, both fictional and non-fictional. The essays are meticulously researched, thoughtfully written, and pro-vide readers with a deeper understanding of Ward's work, offering unique insights into the complexity of Ward's writing and exploring both the already uncovered and for thefirst time unearthed meanings that emerge from it.--Karla Rohová, University of Ostrava "Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies"

This brilliant and timely collection covers a startling range of approaches to Jesmyn Ward's work - from ecocriticism to abolitionism to Afropessimism, and beyond. Harrison, Keeble and Torres-Quevedo's constellation of essays deftly guides us through and bears witness to Ward's powerful portraits of Black life and death, Black pasts and futures, and Black despair and hope.--Joanna Davis-McElligatt, University of North Texas

About the Author

Sheri-Marie Harrison is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri, where she researches and teaches Contemporary literature and mass culture of the African Diaspora and directs the Individualized Degrees program. She is the author of Negotiating Sovereignty in Postcolonial Jamaican Literature (2014). Among her ongoing projects is an author study of Marlon James, a monograph on genre in Contemporary Black fiction. She is also a co-editor for the Routledge Companion to the Novel (forthcoming 2024).

Arin Keeble is a Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Culture at Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland. His research interests include the literary and cultural representation of terrorism, crisis, neoliberalism and systemic violence. He is co-editor of Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays (2023) and is the author of Narratives of Hurricane Katrina in Context (2019), and his writing appears in journals such as Critique, Journal of American Studies, Post45, Parallax, Punk and Post-Punk, and TLS.

Maria Elena Torres-Quevedo is a trade union organiser based in Edinburgh, Scotland. She received her PhD from Edinburgh University in 2021. Her dissertation focused on contemporary American women's autobiographies and posthumanism