So I kept pulling my punches. And later I realised that was a mistake. Life doesn’t spare the kind of people who I write about, so I felt like it wou… - Jesmyn Ward

(What’s the last great book you read?) “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of America Capitalism,” by Edward E. Baptist. It taught me so much about slavery and how slavery enabled America to become America. Every time I left my house after reading it, I saw the world differently. I saw the legacy of human misery underpinning it all...(If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?) “The Half Has Never Been Told.” It’s an essential book for anyone who seeks to understand the America we live in now.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?) This is when I became a reading glutton. I loitered in the library and picked books off the shelf by random. I read a lot of British children’s literature by accident — “The Secret Garden”; “A Little Princess”; “Five Children and It”; the Narnia series, etc. — so much so that I confused American spellings and British spellings until I was in high school. I also read a ton of books about witches. If the word “witch” or the name of a witch was in the title, I read it: “The Witch Family”; “Little Witch”; “The Witch of Blackbird Pond”; and “Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth.” And finally, I found myself drawn to books about independent girls: “Harriet the Spy”; “Island of the Blue Dolphins”; “Julie of the Wolves”; “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler”; “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry”; the “Pippi Longstocking” books; and the “Anne of Green Gables” series are a few. I still think about those heroines all the time. Reading about them helped me to discover the kind of person I wanted to be.

Place is important to my writing; I believe that if a reader gets a clear picture of the place where a character is from, then they can understand what motivates the character, what limits him or her…