Jesmyn Ward to read at Millsaps

Jesmyn Ward, whose novel Salvage the Bones won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction, is scheduled to read from her works at 4 p.m. Thursday in room 215 of the Gertrude C. Ford Academic Complex at Millsaps College.

The reading is free and open to the public.

Ward, now a faculty member at Tulane University, has won five Hopwood Awards, been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and served as the Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. All three of her books — two novels (“Salvage the Bones” and “Where the Line Bleeds”) and a memoir (“Men We Reaped”) — are set on the Gulf Coast where she grew up. Shortly after Ward received her master of fine arts degree in creative writing from the University of Michigan in 2005, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, and Ward and her family were forced to evacuate. Later, as a professor at the University of New Orleans, Ward drove to and from work through neighborhoods leveled by the storm.

Ward’s memoir confronts five years of her life in which she lost five young men to death. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, it has been named one of the Best Books of 2013 by Publishers Weekly, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, NPR, Kirkus Review, New York Magazine and Time Magazine.