CULTURETECHLENSJesmyn Ward
VERIFIED evidence grade — build store (JSON graph)
Combined Graph record U-07243 · provenance: build store (JSON graph), record CTL-E-6014.
Jesmyn Ward is a Mississippi novelist, memoirist, and professor of creative writing at Tulane University whose fiction is rooted in the Black communities of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, including her hometown of DeLisle. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, held a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford from 2008 to 2010, and served as Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. Her novel Salvage the Bones, set around Hurricane Katrina, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2011, and Sing, Unburied, Sing won the same award in 2017, making her a two-time winner. Her memoir Men We Reaped, mourning five young Black men lost in her community, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She edited the anthology The Fire This Time, received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017, and later published the novel Let Us Descend. Her work joins lyrical, formally inventive prose to an unsparing record of poverty, kinship, grief, and endurance in the rural Black South.
Answer summary · this record in brief, from its own record text
Jesmyn Ward is a Mississippi novelist, memoirist, and professor of creative writing at Tulane University whose fiction is rooted in the Black communities of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, including her hometown of DeLisle. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, held a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford from 2008 to 2010, and served as Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi.
Notes
Staged 2026-10-16 under CTL-GOV-006 (Scan Tail Wave 3 — 747 Program, Wave 10; third Scan Tail packet at the founder's 40-record size). Gate A (2026-10-16): no Jesmyn Ward entity in the live graph at 3,683 entities (exact / normalized / alias + token containment); ID CTL-E-6014 free. Supply: 747 Supply Ledger, Tier 4 — Scan Tail Wave 2 packet ordered reserve, position 9 of 25 (corpus-gap-candidates-2026-10-15.json ranked clean survivor #1043). The scan supplied the NAME STRING ONLY; no fact in this record is sourced to it (CTL-GOV-004). SCOPE GATE: PASS — National literary record with a Mississippi Gulf Coast center; included on CTL's Black cultural record for authorship, not a Chicago subject. Vital status: LIVING — verified: Tulane lists her as a current professor and Bloomsbury describes her as currently teaching at Tulane and living in Mississippi (pages accessed 2026-10-16). No tribute language used. STATISTICS (sourced, dated): Two National Book Awards for Fiction (2011, 2017), per Tulane University and Bloomsbury, accessed 2026-10-16. CONFLICT SHOWN: GradeSaver credits the National Book Award also to Where the Line Bleeds (2008) and calls Men We Reaped a novel; the publisher and university records support awards only for the 2011 and 2017 novels and classify Men We Reaped (2013) as a memoir — the GradeSaver claims are not adopted. MEDIA: photo HELD (Named candidate: Tulane University faculty portrait of Jesmyn Ward (rights held by Tulane / photographer; PHOTO-001 record and permission required before use — HELD). named as candidate; no file-page verification in this pass); chart FILLED (charts/chart-ctl-e-6014-jesmyn-ward.svg); video HELD (no matching-entity CTL Short or verified-rights archival video staged); audio HELD (no rights-cleared matching-entity audio staged). MEDIA LAYER (staged 2026-10-16; full per-asset PHOTO-001 records + embed specs in the packet's staged JSON, Drive packet folder): map = N/A (Non-place record; no map attaches at the entity layer.) | visual_assets = HELD: | chart = FILLED (CTL-created SVG (black / deep red / gold) built only from this record's sourced facts) | video = HELD (No Short in the Shorts Link Map has Jesmyn Ward as its subject; the map's 'Ward' string matches are unrelated ) | audio = HELD (No audiobook excerpt or author recording with a CTL rights basis was staged in this pass.)
Sources
- Tulane University, School of Liberal Arts, faculty biography of Jesmyn Ward — MFA, Tulane professorship, National Book Awards 2011 and 2017, MacArthur Fellowship 2017, Stegner Fellowship — https://liberalarts.tulane.edu/english/faculty-staff/jesmyn-ward (primary source · build store)
- Bloomsbury Publishing, author page for Jesmyn Ward — two National Book Awards, Men We Reaped honors, Let Us Descend, 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, Tulane professorship and Mississippi residence — https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/author/jesmyn-ward/ (primary source · build store)
- GradeSaver, Jesmyn Ward biography — DeLisle upbringing and Katrina experience; contains errors corrected against the publisher and university sources above — http://www.gradesaver.com/author/jesmyn-ward (build store)
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Record CTL-E-6014 · Combined Graph record U-07243 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · 3 sources.
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Researched and maintained by the CultureTechLens research program · CultureTechLens Combined Graph, Release 2026-11-04. Corrections are public: the corrections log.
Cite this record
Chicago: CultureTechLens. “Jesmyn Ward (CTL-E-6014).” CultureTechLens Combined Graph. Chicago, IL: CultureTechLens, 2026. https://culturetechlens.com/graph/entities/ctl-e-6014/
APA: CultureTechLens. (2026). Jesmyn Ward (CTL-E-6014) [Entity record]. CultureTechLens Combined Graph. https://culturetechlens.com/graph/entities/ctl-e-6014/
MLA: CultureTechLens. “Jesmyn Ward (CTL-E-6014).” CultureTechLens Combined Graph, 2026, https://culturetechlens.com/graph/entities/ctl-e-6014/
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