I grab the door so it don't slam, ease it into the jam.

I try to look like this is normal and boring so Pop will think I've earned these 13 years, so Pop will know I'm ready to pull what needs to be pulled, separate innards from muscle, organs from cavities. When Pop tell me he need my help and I see that black knife slid into the belt of his pants I follow Pop out the house, try to keep my back straight, my shoulders even as a hanger. I like to think that it's something I could look at straight. (Reading) I like to think I know what death is. And the novel opens on his 13th birthday. He's growing up in a small town in the South, in rural Mississippi, called Bois Sauvage. JESMYN WARD: So the narrator here is Jojo. SAM BRIGER, BYLINE: I'd like to start with a reading, if you could - maybe the beginning of the book. She spoke with FRESH AIR producer Sam Briger. Jesmyn Ward has written and edited other books, including the memoir 'Men We Reaped' about five men from her hometown who died young, including her brother who was killed in a car crash. Ward based it on the town she grew up in and lives in today called DeLisle. Ward's characters live in the fictional rural town of Bois Sauvage on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Helping bolster Jojo through these trying circumstances is the unfaltering love between him and his grandfather and his toddler sister Kayla. Jojo's white father, who was never much of a presence in Jojo's life, is doing time for drugs at the state penitentiary, the infamous Parchman Farm. She's self-medicating her grief from the covered-up murder of her brother when they were in high school. His drug-addicted mother Leonie is unreliable.

'Sing, Unburied, Sing' tells the story of Jojo, a mixed race 13-year-old boy. Her previous novel, 'Salvage The Bones,' also won that award. She received a MacArthur Fellowship, and this month her novel 'Sing, Unburied, Sing' won the National Book Award for fiction. It's been quite a year for author Jesmyn Ward.

Sing unburied song