Jesmyn Ward is the author of the novels Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, which won the 2011 National Book Award for fiction. Jesmyn grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and a Grisham Visiting Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. She is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of South Alabama.