Navigate Your Stars

Description

As an adult, I learned this: persist. Work hard. Face rejection, weather the setbacks, until you meet the gatekeeper who will open a door for you. Jesmyn Ward grew up in a poor, rural community in Mississippi. Today, as the first woman to win the National Book Award twice, she is celebrated as one of America's greatest living writers. Navigate Your Stars is a stirring reflection on the value of hard work and the importance of respect for oneself and others. First delivered as a 2018 commencement address at Tulane University, it captures Ward's inimitable voice as she reflects on her experiences as a Southern black woman, addressing the themes of grit, adversity and the importance of family bonds. Beautifully illustrated in full colour, this is a meditative and profound book that will inspire all readers preparing for the next chapter in their lives.

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur 'Genius' Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency and the Strauss Living Prize. She is the first female author to win two National Book Awards for Fiction, for Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) - which was also shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction (2018) - and Salvage the Bones (2011). She is also the editor of the anthology The Fire This Time, the author of the memoir Men We Reaped and the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds. She is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi. @jesmimi

Blazing with power, grief and tenderness. Ward takes the territory made so familiar by writers such as William Faulkner or Eudora Welty, and reclaims it -- Praise for 'Sing, Unburied, Sing' * Financial Times * Ward is a lyrical, visceral storyteller, one who is as adept at conveying the tenderness of sibling love as the terror and brutality of racist violence -- Praise for 'Sing, Unburied, Sing' * Daily Mail *