Men We Reaped: A Memoir

Originally published: 2013.;In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five men in her life, to drugs, accidents, suicide and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: why? And as she began to write about the experience of living through death, she realized the truth – and it took her breath away. Here, she bravely tells her story, revisiting the agonizing losses of her only brother and her friends.

Jesmyn Ward received her M.F.A. from the University of Michigan and is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University. She is the editor of the anthology The Fire This Time and the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds as well as two National Book Award-winning novels, Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing. A 2017 MacArthur Fellow in Fiction, Ward lives in DeLisle, Mississippi.

[A] torrential, sorrowing tribute to five young black men . . . Ward tells their stories with tenderness and reverence; they live again in these pages. . . . This work of great grief and beauty renders them individual and irreplaceable. – New York Times, 50 Best Memoirs

Men We Reaped reaffirms Ms. Ward’s substantial talent. It’s an elegiac book that’s rangy at the same time. She thinks back about her brother, and about her old dead friends, and about their nighttime adventures in cars. Then she declares, ‘I don’t ride with anyone like that anymore.’ – Dwight Garner, New York Times

Jesmyn Ward left her Gulf Coast home for education and experience, but it called her back. It called on her in most painful ways, to mourn. In Men We Reaped, Jesmyn unburies her dead, that they may live again. And through this emotional excavation, she forces us to see the problems of place and race that led these men to their early graves. Full of beauty, love, and dignity, Men We Reaped is a haunting and essential read. – Natasha Trethewey, US Poet Laureate, author of THRALL and NATIVE GUARD, winner of the Pulitizer Prize” – publisher