Just. Jasmine Ward is one of the great writers of our time. She's won two national book awards and the MacArthur Genius Grant. She's the author of Salvage the Bones,

Men We Reaped, and Sing Unburied Sing.

I wanted to get her to talk about her work

in a really detailed granular way.

So I asked her to read her work and deconstruct a bit of it.

So this is a piece of her talking about her book, Men We Reaped.

So when I was in graduate school for creative writing one of the things that we would do is the

professor would take a paragraph or a sentence and I'm sure you do this with your students and he would go through

with a fine-tooth comb all the choices that the writer had made and why the

writer begins with this word and ends with this word and look at the shape of the

sentence and look at how he or she does it. So I want to see if we can do that with a

sentence or a paragraph of yours. There's a paragraph in men we've reaped that comes at the end, toward the end of the

introduction that I want to ask you to read and then just as granularly as you can for the writers who are

listening and who love you like just why you made some of the choices you

made and this paragraph I pulled out because it's beautiful and it's

powerful and it's a it's a real building block of the book. It really sets the intention of why I wrote this book. So it has a lot of importance.

Okay. So this here if you could please.

Okay.

From 2000 to 2004, five black young men I grew up with died all violently and seemingly

unrelated deaths.

The first was my brother, Joshua, in October 2000. The second was Ronald in December

2002. The third was CJ in January 2004. The fourth was DeMond in February 2004. The last was Roger in February 2004.

...