David Kirby: “I’m Not the Person She Thinks You Are”
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I spent the first twenty-one years of my life in Baton Rouge. Like everyone else, I knew all about Billy Cannon, the LSU halfback who won the Heisman Trophy and was later arrested for counterfeiting and sent...
Ed Brickell: The Horned Toads Confront Their Young Human Captors
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Batesville, Arkansas and was duly moved to Palestine, Texas at the age of three so my dad could try his hand at coaching Texas high school football. He was pretty good at it...
David Earl Williams: When She Dressed Up Nice
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up at Greenup County in Kentucky right near Plum Fork Holler. My grandfather was a graduate of Leavenworth in Kansas where he received his federal degree in Moonshine. Jesse Stuart came to my high school,...
Lenny Lianne: When Rains Were Frog Chokers
My Southern Legitimacy Statement: I spent the first five-eighth of my life, the formative years, in Virginia and come from Southerners with a love of language and landscape, good storytellers. My ideal meal would be a tall glass of iced...
Claire Massey: Driver Side Window
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My grandparents’ Mississippi home was my port in a storm. There was literal nourishment (oh, that gumbo and cornbread!) as well as literary food for a budding creative. No matter the subject, their bookshelves were open. There...
Jessica Weyer Bentley: Revival
Southern Legitimacy Statement: As with all volunteer vegetation, I was transferred South as a seedling in the wind as my mother decided to give a southern man a chance the second time around. Though I was a New Yorker’s daughter,...
Kent Reichert: Requiem: For Those He Left Behind
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Los Angeles, CA and Belews Creek, NC can be found around the 35th parallel. Both are referred to as “southern” even though they exist at opposite ends of the country. Having spent my formative years in LA...
Carol Parris Krauss: Poem
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born from two western NC mountain folk and have kissed the clouds crossing Grandfather Mountain Bridge. As a Clemson graduate, like my father before me, my blood runs orange. I warsh my clothes and sometime...
Jerry Hogan: Poetry
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’m from Fayetteville, in Northwest Arkansas. Geographically, we’re just barely in the South and are sometimes listed as being in the Southwest – that’s a joke. I was raised with the same stories and myths as everyone...
B. Lynn Zika: Poetry:
Southern Legitimacy Statement: As a child I took comfort in our town square statue. He faced the direction of the state college where my father taught English. To his right the five and dime sheltered magic slates and glass piggy...
Byron Hoot: Poetry:
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born and raised in West Virginia now living in The Wilds of Pennsylvania. Once born in Appalachia, you never live any place else in your heart. Returning I have recycled myself back to where I began, a...
B. Lynne Zika: Poetry:
Southern legitimacy statement: Chub Petersen’s mama didn’t teach him the necessity of summer underthings when he sat in shorts playing marbles on my front sidewalk. Consequently I received an early education in anatomy, albeit not a very welcome one. I...
S. Preston Duncan: Poetry:
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’ve spent my life in Virginia, where I’ve worked barbecue pits and the cattle farm that supplied them. I have no idea why the twangpop on the radio tries to make riding tractors sound fun. I have...
Marjorie Gowdy: Poetry:
Southern Legitimacy Statement Or, I’ll Carry Myself Back Reared on buttered biscuits and fresh corn yet eschewing pinto beans, I am of the South. My people, as we call them, included The Originals, who also dispatched some of my other...
John Dorroh: Memoir: May 2022
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in LaRochelle, France, to parents who were serving in the US Army. My dad was from Alabama, and my mom was from Columbus, Mississippi, where we settled when my dad retired from the military....
Poetry
Essays
