Nathaniel Thames: Poetry: Nov 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: We don’t say ‘I’m from the South’ here. I usually don’t have to say where I’m from. People know our Texas from the way we talk, slow. The way we walk, with a purpose. The way we...
R. A. Allen : Poetry: Nov 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: With the exception of four years in Starkville, Mississippi and short stretch in Lexington, Kentucky, I have lived my life in Memphis, Tennessee, which is actually more Arkansan and Mississippian than Tennesseean. It’s a city of light,...
Tom Daley : Poetry : Nov 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Perhaps some would say that as a transplanted Yankee, I could only write a Southern Illegitimacy Statement, but I lived in the South between the age of 8 and the age of 23. I got my hands...
Marie Griffin: Poetry: Oct 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: The simple fact of being a South Carolinian is enough to qualify me as southern, but i feel my inner southerner is a result of being a Barnet woman. A Barnet woman will rip a person to...
William Heath: poetry: Oct 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: …taught for five years at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, the oldest college west of the Appalachians where the Deep South used to send their favorite sons. In the years he devoted to writing his award-winning novel...
Kalyn Livernois: Poetry: Oct 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: When I was 15, I gave away one of the best shirts I’ve ever owned: black, somehow fitted to my gawky frame, with white lettering that read “I (red heart shape) the South.” I sat beside a...
Traci Elliott: Poetry: Oct 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I come from Charlotte. When I was little, we went to church at Long Creek Baptist, and I was baptized by a preacher named Kenny, all the way under the water, but just for a second, hardly...
Shelley Nation-Watson: Poetry : Oct 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and raised in Oklahoma with sausage gravy and biscuits and grits. My paternal ancestors were removed from Georgia and Tennessee through the Trail of Tears. My family lived on their allotments in the Going...
Lydia Yawn: Poetry: Sept 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Vidalia, Georgia, but I now reside in Valdosta, Georgia, moving from onions into the swampy landscape to study Creative Writing at Valdosta State University. Though my accent may not show it, I am...
Gary Carter: Poetry: Sept 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Having been blessed and honored to have appeared previously in the Mule, I’d proudly hang my southern legitimacy on that fact alone. However, if you need more, let me just point out that when you grow up...
Dennis Ferrara: Poetry: Sept 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I live in Virginia, have lived here for 35 years. I know it’s in the South, but I didn’t recognize that at first. I thought the South was where I grew up—in New Orleans, in Louisiana, in...
Jane Blanchard: Poetry: Sept. 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Native to Virginia and long-resident in Georgia, I’m as Southern as Southern can be. (Let’s not talk about the seven-year stretch in New Jersey.) A prominent Mid-Western poet once told me during a workshop, “I could listen...
Lisa Creech Bledsoe: Poetry: Sept. 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My father’s family were Appalachian farmers from Letcher County, KY and my mother’s were German Jews who ran a kosher deli on Beale Street in Memphis. I live in a remote fold of the NC mountains now....
Mike Horan: Poetry: Sept. 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Mike Horan was raised in the South but now makes his home in the desert outside Palm Springs, California. Landscape I get up while it’s still darkHave toOver 100 before eight a.m.The summer usualBut I need to...
Christopher Louvet: Poetry : August 2021
My Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born in Virginia though the important years happened in North Carolina, now I live in Hanoi, which though considered the north here is still farther south than anywhere else I’ve ever lived. Summer Portrait Nasturtiums and...
Poetry
Essays
