Rowan Tate :: Ancestry ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in a family of Romanian immigrants— my grandmother and five children— that all live in Atlanta, Georgia. I currently live in southern Romania. *Editor’s note: This essay is especially important today as we face...
Scott McLeod :: Cody ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am from the South shore of Long Island which is positively Faulknerian if you compare it to Gatsby’s East Egg. Cody “You ever seen a dead body?” asked Cody. I was just glad he was speaking...
Fox Good :: He Keeps the Faith ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Raised in Maryland, 10 miles from the Mason Dixon. Summered and Wintered (and more often than not Sprung and Fell) in West Virginia, where nouns are verbs and verbs are for the doin’. Drinking Costa Rican coffee,...
Jessica Sampley :: “The Cowcumber Poem,” “South Florida: the lover driving alone sees Indian River fruit,” and “At the Mill Creek Dam, Carbon Hill, Alabama—the Night Jay Almost Died” ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I open my mouth and the South comes out. I grew up listening to my mawmaw’s stories and trying to come to terms with the beauty, complexities, and dualities of growing up in rural Alabama, and I...
Karen Klein :: Remnants ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: This story arrived while I was sitting in the cemetery in Morgantown, West Virginia at the end of S High Street. It was a place I frequented often on sunny days, or cool days, too if it...
James Huneycutt :: Drug Policy Memo ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: The author is an ex-offender who runs a successful plumbing company in Virginia. He scribbles on the backs of invoices, estimates and parts lists. These scraps accumulate on the dashboard of his plumbing van until he can...
John Jacobson :: 1979 ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I live in the western Catskill Mountains, at the northern edge of Appalachia, south of the Adirondacks, most of New England and of course Canada. We’re south of a lot here. Anyway, I try to write about...
Jordan Thornton :: Youth Grouping ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up falling asleep to the sound of a box fan in the window. I’ll stop at any fruit stand that’s selling boiled peanuts. There aren’t many bodies of water that I won’t swim in. My...
William Heath :: Preacher Knox; Jail, No Bail; Tales from Liberty ::
Southern Literature: For five years I taught American literature and creative writing at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, the favorite school of the antebellum aristocracy in the South; I am the author of an award-winning novel about the civil rights...
Richard Collins :: Cement Buddha and The Past Is Not Past ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement My first two wives (it didn’t work out; it didn’t work out) were from Southern California, where I grew up, but the third (the charm) is from Louisiana. Her Cajun father – who spoke no English until...
John Haymaker :: Reprise of a Vanishing Act ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: You might say I was halfway to Dixie the day I was born on account of the Kansas twang I picked up from my parents, who raised me in Chicago shortly after my birth. The twang was...
Erin Savage :: When a Tea Party Is Not a Tea Party: An Unwanted Invite ::
Southern legitimacy statement: My parents dragged me away from the home I loved in Louisville, to put down roots in the frigid Midwest. My time residing in Louisville, the home of my earliest memories, was well spent though. When I...
Chance Jungling :: An Ode to Steve ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am not from the south. I grew up in small town Iowa, surrounded by alcoholics. I spent many days growing up riding around with my grandpa in his truck, him drinking Busch light the whole time...
Poetry
Essays
