Jesmyn Ward is a long way away from the environment she writes about, yet she is lauded as a southern author with the ability to capture the essence of her home.  Ward, who is currently entering her second year as a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, is working on her second novel about the residents of a rural southern town based on her own home of DeLisle, Mississippi (the namesake of the DeLisle twins in Ward’s debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds).