On Witness and Respair: Essays

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.

Author: Jesmyn Ward
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Published: 05/19/2026
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.25h x 5.64w x 0.97d
ISBN: 9781668064269


Review Citation(s):
Booklist 04/01/2026
Kirkus Reviews 03/01/2026

About the Author
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.