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Jesmyn Ward's First Essay Collection Lands May 19, 2026. Mississippi Should Pre-Order Now.

Jesmyn Ward — two-time National Book Award winner, MacArthur Fellow, DeLisle resident — releases her first essay collection *On Witness and Respair: Essays* on May 19, 2026, from Scribner. Mississippi readers should pre-order now.

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23 Apr 2026 — 5 min read

Courtesy of Beowulf Sheehan

In January 2026, Scribner announced that Jesmyn Ward — two-time National Book Award winner, MacArthur Fellow, the writer Betsy Burton of the American Booksellers Association has called "the new Toni Morrison" — would publish her first collection of essays in spring 2026. The release date is now confirmed as May 19, 2026. The book is On Witness and Respair: Essays.

It is one of the most anticipated books of 2026. It is, more specifically, one of the most important books any contemporary Mississippi writer is publishing this year. Mississippi readers should know about it, should pre-order it, and should clear time on the calendar to read it in the weeks after release.

On Witness and Respair

On Witness and Respair gathers twenty-three essays, lectures, and introductions Ward has written between 2008 and 2025 — including widely shared classics, three never-before-published speeches, and a new introductory essay that frames the collection. Per Scribner's announcement and Kirkus Reviews' early coverage, the book represents Ward's collected creative nonfiction across roughly two decades of her career.

The title comes from one of Ward's own essays. Respair is an old English word — fallen out of standard usage — that means "the recovery of hope after a period of despair." Ward's use of it has become, in the years since she first deployed it in print, one of the more durable contributions any contemporary writer has made to the way Americans talk about grief and resilience.

The book covers subjects Ward has been writing about in long form for years: the writers and novels that have influenced her (Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Octavia Butler), the experience of growing up poor in DeLisle, Mississippi, the death of her brother Joshua in a drunk-driving accident, the death of her husband Brandon in 2020 from acute respiratory distress syndrome at age 33, the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Hurricane Katrina, the work of writing itself.

Sip and Seen

Ward writes from Mississippi. Most of the major American writers whose work intersects with Mississippi — Faulkner, Welty, Wright, Morrison (in her engagement with Mississippi as setting), Trethewey — wrote about Mississippi from various distances of remove. Ward writes from inside it. She lives in DeLisle, in Hancock County. Her novels are set in fictional Bois Sauvage, modeled on the actual Mississippi Gulf Coast geography she grew up in. Her three children are being raised in the state.

That rootedness produces a specific kind of writing. Salvage the Bones, Ward's 2011 National Book Award-winning novel set in the days leading up to and through Hurricane Katrina, is the most accurate cinematic-quality fictional treatment of Katrina's impact on the Mississippi Coast that exists. Critics and Coast residents have, separately, kept saying so.

On Witness and Respair will, almost certainly, contain prose that does for Mississippi readers what Ward's fiction has done — bringing into language the textures of Coast life that most American readers have not been given access to.

The Katrina anniversary frame. August 2025 was the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Ward's essays — at least some of which have engaged Katrina across multiple essays in different periods — will, almost certainly, include reflection on what the storm did, what the recovery did, what twenty years of distance has revealed. For a Mississippi readership that lived through Katrina or grew up in its long aftermath, that material has weight.

The grief work. Ward has been writing publicly about the death of her husband Brandon in 2020. The essay she published in Vanity Fair — "On Witness and Respair," which lent the collection its title — is one of the more widely read pieces of pandemic-era American writing. The book will, presumably, include further essays on grief, family, and what it has been like to live and parent and write in the years since.

The craft essays. Working writers in Mississippi — and there are more of them than is generally recognized — have been waiting for a Ward craft book. Some of the essays in the collection address writing directly: how she works, what she has learned from other writers, how she approaches revision. For MFA students at Ole Miss, USM, JSU, and Tougaloo, and for the broader Mississippi writers' community, that material is going to be valuable.

Ward, A History

Ward grew up in DeLisle, the daughter of a working-class Black family that often went hungry. She earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, where she won five Hopwood Awards. She held a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford and served as the Grisham Writer in Residence at Ole Miss for the 2010–2011 academic year.

In 2017, she became the first woman and the first person of color to win two National Book Awards for Fiction — joining Faulkner, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Philip Roth, and John Updike on that list. The two wins came for Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). She has also won the MacArthur "Genius Grant" (2017), is the youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and was named to the New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list for Men We Reaped, Salvage the Bones, and Sing, Unburied, Sing in 2024.

Her 2023 novel Let Us Descend, an Oprah's Book Club pick about an enslaved woman's journey from the Carolinas to a Mississippi sugar plantation near New Orleans, was an instant New York Times bestseller.

She is, by every measurable indicator, the most decorated living American novelist whose primary subject is the rural Mississippi Gulf Coast.

What's next

Beyond On Witness and Respair, Ward is reportedly at work on two additional books: a novel for adults set in New Orleans at the height of the American slave trade, and a young-adult novel about a Black girl from the South with supernatural powers. She is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair. The University Press of Mississippi published Conversations with Jesmyn Ward in August 2025 — a 204-page collected interview volume tracking her career from 2009 to 2024.

That's a writer in the middle of one of the most productive decades any American novelist will have this century.

Pre-orders

Pre-orders. Show up. The book lands May 19, 2026. Order it from Square Books in Oxford, from Lemuria in Jackson, from Pass Christian Books on the Coast, from any of the Mississippi-rooted independent bookstores that need the support and that have, for years, been carrying Ward's books at the front of the shop.

Read it. Discuss it. Teach it. Give it to a young Mississippi writer who needs to see what's possible.

Mississippi has, in 2026, a generation of writers — Ward, Laymon, Trethewey, Angie Thomas, Imani Perry by adoption, Catherine Lacey, and many others — producing work at a level the state has not seen since the mid-twentieth century. Ward's essay collection is, in May, going to be one of the year's most important books from any of them.

Pre-order it. We'll see you in May.

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