In 2008, just as Ward had decided to give up writing and enroll in a nursing program,
Where the Line Bleeds was accepted by
Agate Publishing. It was shortlisted for the
VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the
Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Starting on the day twin protagonists Joshua and Christophe DeLisle graduate from high school,
Where the Line Bleeds follows the brothers as their choices pull them in opposite directions. From 2008 to 2010, Ward had a
Stegner Fellowship at
Stanford University. She was the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence at the
University of Mississippi for the 2010–2011 academic year. In her second novel,
Salvage the Bones, Ward homed in once more on the visceral bond between poor black siblings growing up on the Mississippi Coast. Ward uses vibrant language steeped in metaphors to illuminate the fundamental aspects of love, friendship, passion, and tenderness. Explaining her main character's fascination with the Greek mythological figure of
Medea, Ward told Elizabeth Hoover of
The Paris Review: "It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as 'other'. I wanted to align Esch with that classic text, with the universal figure of Medea, the antihero, to claim that tradition as part of my Western literary heritage. The stories I write are particular to my community and my people, which means the details are particular to our circumstances, but the larger story of the survivor, the
savage, is essentially a universal, human one." On November 16, 2011, Ward won the
National Book Award for Fiction for
Salvage the Bones. Interviewed by
CNN's Ed Lavandera on November 16, 2011, she said that both her nomination and her victory had come as a surprise, given that the novel had been largely ignored by mainstream reviewers. Ward received an
Alex Award for
Salvage the Bones on January 23, 2012. The Alex Awards are given out each year by the
Young Adult Library Services Association to ten books written for adults that resonate strongly with young people aged 12–18. Commenting on the winning books in
School Library Journal, former Alex Award committee chair Angela Carstensen described
Salvage the Bones as a novel with "a small but intense following – each reader has passed the book to a friend." Ward joined the faculty at Tulane in the fall of 2014. In July 2011, Ward wrote that she had finished the first draft of her third book, calling it the hardest thing she had ever written. It was a memoir titled
Men We Reaped and was published in 2013. The book explores the lives of her brother and four other young black men who lost their lives in her hometown. Her third novel,
Sing, Unburied, Sing, was released in 2017 Set in Ward's fictitious Mississippi town, Bois Sauvage, the novel is narrated from three perspectives mainly within a rural family. Jojo, a young African-American boy, navigates a maturation from childhood to adulthood. His mother, Leonie, struggles with addiction and the challenges of raising children. Finally, Richie, a wayward ghost from the Mississippi State Penitentiary, haunts Jojo and pleads with his family to help him find closure. The novel won the 2017 National Book Award for fiction. Ward thus became the first woman and first Black American to win two National Book Awards for Fiction. The novel also won an
Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. In 2018, Ward contributed her Prologue from
Men We Reaped to a special edition of
Xavier Review (Vol.38. No.2), which includes a foreword by Thomas Bonner Jr. an afterword by Robin G. Vander (both editors of the volume), a chronology, and fifteen essays by scholars, including
Trudier Harris and Keith Cartwright. At the time this was the first book-length publication on Ward. Ward is a contributor to the 2019 anthology
New Daughters of Africa, edited by
Margaret Busby. In 2020, Simon & Schuster published Ward's
Navigate Your Stars, adapted from a speech the author made at Tulane's 2018 commencement. Ward's personal essay, "On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by Pandemic", about the death of her husband, her grief, the spreading of the
COVID-19 pandemic, and the resurgent
Black Lives Matter movement, appeared in the September 2020 issue of
Vanity Fair, guest-edited by
Ta-Nehisi Coates. In 2022, the
U.S. Library of Congress selected Ward as the winner of the
Library's Prize for American Fiction. At age 45, Ward is the youngest person to receive the Library's fiction award for her lifetime of work. In July 2024, she was one of only three authors (with
Elena Ferrante and
George Saunders) to have the most books (three) in "The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century", a New York Times survey of 503 literary figures. ==Personal life==