Men We Reaped
by Jesmyn Ward
Buy on AmazonMen We Reaped is a memoir by the African-American writer Jesmyn Ward. The book was published by Bloomsbury in 2013. The memoir focuses on Ward's own personal history and the deaths of five Black men in her life over a four-year span between 2000 and 2004. Men We Reaped won the Heartland Prize for non-fiction, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction.
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"Jesmyn Ward writes to keep her heart from exploding. *Men We Reaped,* an accounting of the deaths, in four years, of five men close to her, is beautifully written and gut-wrenchingly sad. “Grief doesn’t fade,” she writes. “Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways.” Ward writes about her dead brother and dead friends with loving detail: their eyes, their smiles and the color of their skin. Her writing revives the dead men and allows them to speak from beyond the grave: “Hello. We are here. Listen.”"
NPR Books We Love — 2013 · apps.npr.org
Publishers Weekly's Best Books — 2013 · publishersweekly.com
"I am looking forward to reading Jesmyn Ward’s memoir, “Men We Reaped.”"
By the Book: Edwidge Danticat · nytimes.com