This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. There's a small town in coastal Mississippi called DeLeal. Mostly black, a few thousand people. Most of them have lived there for generations. My guest today, writer Jessman Ward, was raised there, and her family has been there for more than a hundred years. And for the last two decades, she's been writing about it. Her new book is a

collection of 22 nonfiction essays that Ward wrote over 17 years. She wrote the first one in 2008,

three years after Hurricane Katrina took her grandmother's house. She wrote the last one in 2025,

sitting with the loss of her brother and her partner and her grandmother's house. She wrote the last one in 2025, sitting with the loss of her brother and her partner and her grandmother, going back to the music she had grown up on, because as she

writes, it was the only place that still felt like home. Ward is the first woman and the first

black American to win the National Book Award for

Fiction twice, for her novels, Salvage the Bones, and Sing Unburied Sing. She is also a MacArthur

fellow. The title of the essay collection is called On Witness and Respair, which is also the title

of her 2020 Vanity Fair essay about the death of her spouse and the father of her children.

Respair is an English word that was nearly obsolete for a hundred years. It means the recovery of hope after despair.

Jesmond Ward, welcome back to fresh air. It's good to be here. Thank you for having me.

Respair. That old word that is the definition, the definition being fresh hope after despair.

The reader never sees it inside, and I'd love to know for you to talk to me about that word,

despair, a word that's from really the 1500s. How did you even find that word to be able to

articulate the bigger thing that you wanted to say? I discovered the word in 2020,

like during 2020 that year. You know, and I just lost my partner, the father of my children.

I just lost him in January of that year. You know, the pandemic began. We were, you know,

sequestered from each other. I was unfortunately spending a lot of unhealthy time

on Twitter, but it was serving a purpose, right, at the time, because, you know, we were also

isolated. And back then, Twitter was one of those places, you know, as a social media app, that we

can go to where we could find a sense of community, a sense

of togetherness, a sense of connection.

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