Telling Stories with Dana Stevens
Episode Book Pairing
Each episode the The Gray Matters podcast is paired with a book that complements the episode’s subject matter or simply had an impact on our guest’s life and journey.
Sing, Unburied, Sing
by Jesmyn Ward
In Jesmyn Ward’s first novel since her National Book Award–winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi’s past and present that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. Ward is a major American writer, multiply awarded and universally lauded, and in Sing, Unburied, Sing she is at the height of her powers.
Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie’s children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.
Sing, Unburied, Sing grapples with the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power, and limitations, of the bonds of family. Rich with Ward’s distinctive, musical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic new work and an essential contribution to American literature.
Get your copy of Sing, Unburied, Sing from Bookshop.org.
About Dana Stevens
Dana Stevens has had a long career writing features and television. Her most recent film, “Fatherhood,” starring Kevin Hart, premiered on Netflix in 2021 to large audiences worldwide. Her previous screenwriting credits include “Safe Haven,” directed by Lasse Hallstrom, “City of Angels,” directed by Brad Silberling, “For Love of the Game,” directed by Sam Raimi, “Blink,” directed by Michael Apted, and “Life or Something Like It,” starring Angelina Jolie. She created and produced “Reckless,” a legal drama for CBS, and “What About Brian,” an ABC series. Her next film, “The Woman King,” starring Academy Award winner, Viola Davis and directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, premiered at the 2022 Toronto Film Festival and was recently released in theaters.
Dana has also directed a short film, “Short Term Rental” which made its big screen debut at the San Antonio Film Festival. Projects in development include the Tri-Star adaption of bestseller “The Nightingale,” and a film about singer-songwriter Carly Simon for EOne.
