Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, May 4, 2019, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

DeLisle, Mississippi

Synopsis: Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. He doesn’t lack in fathers to study, chief among them his Black grandfather, Pop. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent White father, Michael, who is being released from prison; his absent White grandfather, Big Joseph, who won’t acknowledge his existence; and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager.

The Deepwater Horizon fire

The Author

Jesmyn Ward was born in Berkeley in 1977. Her family moved to DeLisle, Mississippi, when she was 3 years old, and she grew up there. She was bullied by Black students at the public school she attended, so her mother's employer paid her tuition to a private school, where she was bullied and isolated for being the only Black child in the school. DeLisle forms the model for the fictional town of "Bois Sauvage," which is the setting for both Sing, Unburied, Sing, and her previous novel Salvage the Bones. She moved away from Mississippi to attend Stanford University, where she earned a BA in English in 1999 and an MA in media studies and communication in 2000.

She received a MFA from the University of Michigan and returned to the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She was so traumatized by what she saw that she was unable to write for three years, during which time she was shopping around her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds, and had become so discouraged that she was making plans to enroll in a nursing program when her book was finally published to much critical acclaim. Her second book was a memoir entitled Men We Reaped about 5 young men from DeLisle who died young, including her younger brother who was killed by a drunk driver. This memoir was short-listed for the National Critics Circle Book Award for autobiography.

In 2011, Ward published her second novel, Salvage the Bones, which won the National Book Award. Sing, Unburied, Sing, published in 2017, also won the National Book Award. In 2017 she also was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant.

In the short PBS video clip below, Jesmyn Ward answers readers' questions about Sing, Unburied, Sing.




For Further Reading

Parchman Farm

The Marshall Project, named in honor of Justice Thurgood Marshall, is great resource for material criminal justice issues. This link will take you to a photo essay about the prison plantation system, like Parchman Farm, which still exists to this day.

If you want to do a deep dive into criminal justice issues, I recently read a fascinating article about the prison abolition movement in the New York Times. If you have the time, it is really thought provoking.