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Table of Contents
About The Book
The collected creative nonfiction of a singular American writer, Jesmyn Ward, including widely shared classics, three never-before-published speeches, and an introductory essay.
Respair (noun, obsolete), fresh hope after despair.
From the two-time National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author Jesmyn Ward, this collection of essays documents more than a decade of work in the life of a singular writer often lauded as “the heir apparent to Toni Morrison” (LitHub). Beginning with her upbringing in a multigenerational household in rural Mississippi, the cradle of both her youth and her gift for storytelling, Ward brings her keen wisdom and hauntingly lyrical prose to a range of topics, following in her grandmother Dorothy’s footsteps when she promises always to “Tell it straight. Tell it all.”
True to her word, in these pages Ward contemplates the writers and novels of her youth and adulthood—the transformative power of discovering Octavia Butler as a twenty-something, the mirror that Richard Wright’s novels held up to her own childhood, and of course, her lifelong love for Toni Morrison. Ward ruminates on her approach to both fiction and life, reflecting on the power of the novel, how to raise a Black son in an era of rising divisiveness and cruelty, as well as her own personal tragedies—including the titular essay of the collection, which tells the story of her partner’s sudden death on the eve of the COVID-19 epidemic. Every bit as piercing and moving as her fiction, On Witness and Respair is a testament to Ward’s powers as “one of America’s finest living writers” (San Francisco Chronicle) and is a monument to hope, beauty, and personal and collective resilience.
Respair (noun, obsolete), fresh hope after despair.
From the two-time National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author Jesmyn Ward, this collection of essays documents more than a decade of work in the life of a singular writer often lauded as “the heir apparent to Toni Morrison” (LitHub). Beginning with her upbringing in a multigenerational household in rural Mississippi, the cradle of both her youth and her gift for storytelling, Ward brings her keen wisdom and hauntingly lyrical prose to a range of topics, following in her grandmother Dorothy’s footsteps when she promises always to “Tell it straight. Tell it all.”
True to her word, in these pages Ward contemplates the writers and novels of her youth and adulthood—the transformative power of discovering Octavia Butler as a twenty-something, the mirror that Richard Wright’s novels held up to her own childhood, and of course, her lifelong love for Toni Morrison. Ward ruminates on her approach to both fiction and life, reflecting on the power of the novel, how to raise a Black son in an era of rising divisiveness and cruelty, as well as her own personal tragedies—including the titular essay of the collection, which tells the story of her partner’s sudden death on the eve of the COVID-19 epidemic. Every bit as piercing and moving as her fiction, On Witness and Respair is a testament to Ward’s powers as “one of America’s finest living writers” (San Francisco Chronicle) and is a monument to hope, beauty, and personal and collective resilience.
About The Author
Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan
Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, the Strauss Living Prize, and the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. She is the winner of two National Book Awards for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage the Bones. She is also the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds and the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.
Product Details
- Publisher: Scribner (May 19, 2026)
- Length: 256 pages
- ISBN13: 9781668064283
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Raves and Reviews
Named A Most-Anticipated Book of 2026 by Oprah Daily, Time Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, LitHub, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Garden & Gun
"Few contemporary writers express the agony and beauty of Black American life as evocatively as Ward... In her first nonfiction collection, she seamlessly blends the personal and the political. Marvelous and unforgettable." —Booklist, STARRED review
"The two-time National Book Award winner gathers previously published essays with new pieces on topics from fiction to cinema, examining figures real and imagined...From celebrity profiles to DNA test results to a tender meditation on parenting a Black son, Jesmyn Ward moves nimbly among people and themes."
—Time Magazine
"The communities and ecosystems that come alive in Ward’s work make you want to be with her people and creatures...Her sentences carry real wisdom, and wisdom seems in short supply. If she can find a path to collective resilience in these dark times, I’d better suit up and buckle down."
—LA Times
"A stirring collection."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Urgently explores how art helps us survive, how grief reshapes a life, and how to keep loving in a country that often feels allergic to it...When the world is spinning, Ward writes the kind of sentences that make it hold still."
—Oprah Daily
"There are few writers in the world who write eloquently as Jesmyn Ward, who brings a fierceness, beauty, and the sharpest resonance to every sentence... Nothing Ward writes is ever extraneous, but On Witness and Respair is a notably invigorating and insightful work; a true treasure from one of our most brilliant living writers."
—Chicago Review of Books
"[A] tribute to the power of hope, beauty and resilience."
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Leave it to one of our greatest living writers, Jesmyn Ward, to bring back a word from the 1500s and give it fresh meaning in the title of her forthcoming book: respair, or ‘fresh hope after despair.’ Known for her moving and award-winning fiction, this collection of essays gives readers a sense of the powerful Southern woman behind the unforgettable stories."
—Garden & Gun
Praise for Jesmyn Ward
"Jesmyn is, quite simply, the best of us.”
—Ta-Nehisi Coates
"Ward is one of America’s finest living writers. Ward’s mesmerizing sentences, her dazzling descriptions of the natural and unnatural, the way she coerces time and guides readers between a heartbreakingly familiar story of torment and moments of sublime tenderness, suggests a protean artist in her element."
—San Francisco Chronicle
"Jesmyn Ward does not miss."
—LitHub
"[Ward is] as an artist in total command of American English and a master of the novel form."
—Boston Globe
"Jesmyn Ward is reimagining Southern literature…competing with giants like William Faulkner, while mapping territory all her own."
—New York Times Magazine
"One of the most important voices in contemporary literature."
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Resources and Downloads
High Resolution Images
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Book Cover Image (jpg): On Witness and Respair
eBook 9781668064283
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Author Photo (jpg): Jesmyn Ward Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan(0.1 MB)
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