Author, Writer, Essayist
Eubanks’s work focuses on Race, Identity, and the Culture and Literature of the American South.
New Work“When It’s Darkness on the Delta”
For readers of The Sum of Us and South to America, an essential new look at the roots of American inequality—and the seeds of its transformation.
Once the powerhouse of a fledgling country’s economy, the Mississippi Delta has been consigned to a narrative of destitution. It is often faulted for the sins of the South, portrayed as a regional backwater that willfully cleaved itself from the modern world. But buried beneath the weight of good ol’ boy politics and white-washed histories lies the Delta’s true story.
“When It’s Darkness on the Delta is as brilliant and necessary as the greatest books made by a Mississippian, but it is wholly singular in the way Ralph Eubanks nimbly, and profoundly, rides the voices of the folks making the Delta today. This book is not interested in representation; it is what happens when the responsible love of a people, a region, and an utterly legendary skill meet. Goodness gracious. We are thankful.”
—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir
“This is an important book. Eubanks speaks truth to power about an iconic and ill-understood American landscape and proves beyond question that as the Mississippi Delta goes, so goes our republic.”
—Richard Ford
“Native son, erudite scholar, and deep-seeing observer, Eubanks gets down into the nitty-gritty of Mississippi with this marvelous Delta travelogue and analysis. He makes those lonely backroads come alive in all their difficult, complicated history.”
—Richard Grant, author of Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta
“ I am from the coast of Mississippi. Growing up, the Delta was as foreign to me as another country. But W. Ralph Eubanks’s When It’s Darkness on the Delta brings the Delta home to me. With stunningly beautiful prose and an intimacy that breaks down assumptions, he renders this part of Mississippi with tenderness and unflinching honesty. He tells its story (his family’s story) and, in doing so, he tells the American story. And, even though it is one filled with resilience, it ain’t pretty. What a precious gift.”
—Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again
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