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 and the Strauss Living Prize. She is the first female author to win two National Book Awards for Fiction, for Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Salvage the Bones (2011). She is also the editor of the anthology The Fire This Time, the author of the memoir Men We Reaped and the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds. She is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.

@jesmimi

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Edited by two-time National Book Award winner and Women's Prize shortlisted-author Jesmyn Ward, a timely and groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race in America

In this bestselling collection of essays and poems, Jesmyn Ward gathers a new generation of writers and thinkers to speak on race. From Claudia Rankine to Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Jericho Brown to Carol Anderson, 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.

Envisioned as a response to The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin's groundbreaking 1963 essay collection, The Fire This Time considers the black experience in modern America. Significant progress has been made in the fifty years since Baldwin's essays were published, but America is a long distance away from a post-racial society - a truth that must be confronted if the country is to continue to work towards change.

Baldwin's 'fire next time' is now upon us, and it needs to be talked about. Sage, urgent and impassioned, this is an essential collection edited by one of America's greatest writers.

A harrowing yet hopeful book about race

Uniting the voices of Claudia Rankine, Carol Anderson, Garnette Cadogan and more, this collection of essays and poems is a contemporary response to James Baldwin's 1963 essay collection, The Fire Next Time. Mixing anecdote, humour, passion, fear, anger and a call to arms, it's a powerful read

Powerful ... Alive with purpose, conviction and intellect

A stirring anthology that takes more cues from Baldwin than just its title ... Every poem and essay in Ward's volume remains grounded in a harsh reality

To Baldwin's call we now have a choral response - one that should be read by every one of us committed to the cause of equality and freedom

This is a book to pick up and tuck under our hearts to see what we can build

With this gorgeous chorus - Ward has done the same [as her ancestors]: she has created a world, a space, the one she, herself, was seeking. A new type of belonging, a new place to belong, is exactly what she has given us

This is a book that seeks to place the shock of our own times into historical context and, most importantly, to move these times forward