The Devil and Dave Chappelle by William Jelani Cobb

Salvage the Bones was also a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, as well as a nominee for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She is the author of Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, for which she won the 2011 National Book Award and was honored with the American Library Association’s Alex Award. She is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of South Alabama. 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. Jesmyn Ward grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi. Ward is joined in conversation by writer and historian William Jelani Cobb and Schomburg Center Director Khalil Gibran Muhammad. And as she began to write about the experience of dealing with these losses, she realized that her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships. Over five years, Ward lost her brother and four other young men in her life-to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Though personal experience is at the heart of Ward's previous novels, in her new book, Men We Reaped: A Memoir, she confronts race and reality in America through the story of her own life and the tragic stories of her community.

LIVE welcomes back NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award finalist Jesmyn Ward, author of Where the Line Bleeds and the National Book Award-winner Salvage the Bones. Khalil Gibran Muhammad in 7 words*: I do history to teach and inspire. William Jelani Cobb in 7 words*: Queens born, Howard educated, father of one. Jesmyn Ward in 7 words*: The wolf stalks she shines the light. Watch, follow and share our LIVE Short on YouTube:

The Devil and Dave Chappelle by William Jelani Cobb