I had a quiet start," novelist Jesmyn Ward says of the fledgling years of her career. "Few really paid much attention to my first novel and so no publishing houses were beating down my door to publish the second book."
The beginning may have been challenging, but it was far from foretelling of what was to come. Now a multiple award-winning author (Ward is the only woman in history to have received the National Book Award twice), her 2017 novel Sing, Unburied, Sing - an intimate fictional portrait of a Mississippi family - garnered high-profile acclaim. Barack Obama included it in his best books of the year.
"I took the advice I was given and persisted and worked on my craft," Ward tells Vogue of how she overcame the early struggles. "My top priority is always working on craft rather than building connections."
Her inspirations, she says, are firmly rooted in her home life and largely derived from her family and community. "There are a lot of great storytellers in rural Mississippi," Ward shares of the place that she was born, spent many of her formative years and returned to live as an adult. "I hear them in my head when I write. My family inspires me in so many other ways, too: their strength and resilience, their humour, their love."
As for the creatives who have played a part in shaping her career, they are an eclectic troupe. William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Octavia Butler are the writers she cites as holding particular influence for her. Meanwhile, she considers Janelle Monae, Prince, and The Weeknd to have inspired her experience in the industry - "they have helped me see how to be an artist with their honesty and their creativity".
Her heavily political, lyrical writing has earned her recognition as one of most critically acclaimed writers of her time, and Ward's star shows no signs of slowing. The author is currently on a book tour promoting The Fire This Time – A New Generation Talks About Race as it is published in the UK. The New York Times bestselling collection features a new generation of writers and thinkers - from Claudia Rankine to Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Jericho Brown to Carol Anderson - on the topic of race.
"These voices shine a light on the darkest corners of American history, wrestle with the struggles the country faces today and imagine a better future," reads the description of the book, which is considered a response to James Baldwin’s 1963 seminal essay collection, The Fire This Time, about the experience of black people in modern America. Along with her novels, this collection makes Ward a powerful and important voice in the literary world and beyond.
Read more: Five Minutes With... Jesmyn Ward
So, in a career full of accomplishments, does Ward have a specific moment when she remembers thinking "I've made it"?
"When my second novel, Salvage the Bones, won the National Book Award in 2011, I allowed myself to think, hey, maybe this writing thing is going to work out," she recalls. "I remember a moment on the dance floor that evening, after the award was announced. I was surrounded by so many writers and people from the publishing industry; I felt like I was part of a larger community, which for writers — because we work alone so much — isn’t always the case."
And what advice would she give to those aspiring to follow in her novelist footsteps?
"Persist. If you stop, then you’re removing yourself from the conversation. You have to keep going and weather rejection until you find the person who will open the door for you," are her sage words. "You have to hold up your end of the bargain. Become the best writer you can because nobody owes you anything; you owe that to yourself."
