was first publishe in 2011. The story's narrator is Esch, a 14 year old pregnant black girl with a passion for Greek myths, especially Jason and Medea. The savageness of the human world finds a metaphor in the savagery of Hurricane Katrina: compassionless, grand and all-destroying. Commanding the elements, as Medea does in the myth, is the dream of humans who can only face them, the most terrible of those elements being: themselves. The book won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2011.

Jesmyn Ward is the winner of two National Book Awards for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Salvage the Bones (2011). She is also the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds and the memoir Men We Reaped. She is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.