Ward's National Book Award-winning novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, is set in a small town modeled after her own rural hometown. It centers on a biracial young boy confronting the South's racial legacy.
In Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward recalls the deaths of five young men in her life, which she believes were all connected to being poor and black in the rural South. "It made me feel that I wasn't promised some long life. ...That's not a given for me."