Black novelist Jesmyn Ward 'overjoyed' by MacArthur win

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — An African-American novelist praised for her raw and powerful depictions of poor African-Americans confronting racial and economic inequalities in the rural South said today that winning a MacArthur fellowship gives her time and freedom.

"I think those are the two most important gifts you can give to an artist," Jesmyn Ward said in a video from Tulane University, where she's a professor. "So I am deeply humbled and also overjoyed."

Hours earlier, the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced she was among 24 recipients of the so-called genius grants, which bestow $625,000 on each winner over five years.

Ward was the 2011 recipient of the National Book Award for her second novel, "Salvage the Bones," about the struggles of a poor black family in her native Mississippi, set against the backdrop of Hurricane Katrina approaching and devastating the Gulf Coast.

The author grew up in DeLisle, Miss., a community of about 1,100 residents where more than a third live below the poverty line. Her three novels to date have been set in a fictional Mississippi Gulf Coast town called Bois Sauvage.

Now 40, Ward said she's currently working on a novel set in early 1800s New Orleans at the height of the domestic slave trade.