Award-winning author Jesmyn Ward tells her story of growing up as a Black woman in rural Mississippi, where she lost five young Black men in her life in five years.

Growing up in rural Mississippi, author Jesmyn Ward could never escape the fact that the Black men in her community were dying in staggering numbers.

Systemic racial inequalities and a changing economy left many Black men in the South vulnerable and at risk of incarceration, homelessness, substance abuse, unemployment, and violence.

Ward is a novelist whose work includes Salvage the Bones and is a professor of English at Tulane University.

In Men We Reaped, Ward recounts her family history, her adolescence as the eldest daughter in a low-income household, and her mother and father's struggles to keep their family together.

The book describes how Ward lived through the deaths of her brother and four other men in her life, exploring the realization that all of them died due to the harsh realities of poverty and racism.