From the Book - First Scribner hardcover edition.
Why fiction matters (address at the Library of Congress, 2023)
No mercy in motion (Guernica, 2013)
My true south: why I decided to return home (Time, 2018)
Open minds, open books: as a child in a small town in Mississippi, the library is where I learned about empathyand identity (Harper's Bazaar, 2023)
Growing up and grasping Gone with the Wind (NPR, 2012)
Toni Morrison memorial speech (address at Toni Morrison memorial, St. John the Divine, 2019)
We do not swim in our cemeteries: a legacy of not evacuating (Oxford American, 2008)
A conflicted, imperfect love (introduction, As I Lay Dying, Vintage International edition, 2025)
Cracking the code (New Yorker, 2015)
Head rush: a love for Prince emboldened Jesmyn Ward's father to defy the world's narrow expectations of him (Vogue, 2017)
On discovering-for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (introduction, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, Scribner edition, 2022)
Regina King in Her Element (Vanity Fair, September 2021)
I love you: please don't forget it (introduction, The Fire This Time, Scribner edition, 2016)
Raising a Black son in the US (Guardian, 2017)
The beautiful power of Ta-Nehisi Coates (Vanity Fair, August 2019)
Ava DuVernay's visionary filmmaking is reshaping Hollywood (Smithsonian, 2017)
Jay Gatsby: doomed dreamer (introduction, The Great Gatsby, Scribner edition, 2018)
How to survive in broken worlds: on Octavia Butler's empathy and optimism (introduction, Bloodchild, Seven Stories Press edition, 2022)
On witness and respair: a personal tragedy followed by a pandemic (Vanity Fair, 2020)
Cocoon of sound (Orion, 2025)
You tell your story: you survive (Eudora Welty Lecture, address at the National Press Club, 2019).
