Recent Posts
Syracuse University Press announces that Brian O’Hare’s short story collection “Something Hidden” is the winner of the 2021 Veterans Writing Award. O’Hare is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and former U.S. Marine Corps officer. Currently, he’s an award-winning writer and filmmaker living in Los Angeles. His work has appeared…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Married to a woman from Ocilla, GA. Eat Shit, Tickfaw HE’D BEEN READY for hours – suitcases packed and arranged in the trunk; peanut butter sandwiches wrapped, coffee brewed; the girls’ belongings, not including Big Teddy, wedged in the back – yet still his wife and daughters…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up doing the same stupid things that all redneck Alabama kids do. When I got old enough, I jumped out of state for college and quickly learned that this big old world isn’t all cotton fields and red clay. Being Southern isn’t just an address,…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’m a 7th generation Georgian born in Atlanta as the 3rd great grandson of a Confederate veteran. I was the first in my line to break a 153 year old tradition of staying in the peach state. I’ve been a Braves fan since before the miraculous 1991…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: As a trans woman, I am happy to see you all seeking to create opportunities for a diverse array of southern voices and would love to be a part of realizing that goal. I grew up in Matthews, North Carolina, spending most of my time acting in…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Paul Jones was born in Hickory, NC. He did started his growing up in Charlotte, then spent four years at NC State. Having been at NC State allowed him to teach for 40 years at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Of a Marriage My…
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 act, hospitable. The way we dress, not to please you….
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and raised in Missouri and now live (very, very) close to Atlanta. With the exception of college, I have spent my entire life in the South. Political Ads As per the recent changes in campaign laws stemming from the recent 2043, 9-to-6 SCOTUS ruling,…
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, sound, oak trees, and give and take. We’ve Been Places…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Been a while, and this is not a good one. But when my parents stopped at a Dairy Queen on the way back from Florida, I went to get a drink since it was 90 +. There were two fountains. One had a line of about 50…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I like my tea sweet but not my cornbread. My great-great grandfather, his father and his uncles were with Lee when he surrendered at Appomattox. I learned those old stories from my great-grandmother, who we called Grandmammy. I’d rather eat red beans and rice than fancy French…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in north Alabama to a mom from Alabama and a dad from Georgia. Even though I was raised in the north in southern Ohio, my southern legitimacy runs generationally deep. I am sweet tea drinking, fried chicken eating, SEC loving gal! I am…
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 smelly playing in the polluted Timber Branch near my home…
Southern Legitamacy Statement I was born and raised in a part of the country not thought of a typically southern. I was raised in Estill County, Kentucky, which lies beside the Kentucky River at the foothills of the rugged Appalachian Mountains. I have always thought of Kentucky as a bastard…
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 shreds with a wink and a smile. Barnet women are…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and raised in Spartanburg, S.C. to a resilient Renaissance woman and a long-haul trucker who would talk to everyone who crossed his path about civil rights. I spent my summer days barefoot in vegetable and flower gardens and spent the winters wishing for snow….
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I don’t know if any of my people were legitimate, but they were most certainly poor dirt farmers in the Carolinas back into the 1600’s. My folks consider sweet potato a vegetable, and salads wiggle like a hula girl’s hips. Is that a decent enough pedigree to…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: As I expressed three years prior, when you were so kind as to accept “The Neurosurgeon’s Rat,” my Southern legitimacy is honorary and based on my near-decade in Fayetteville with my wife and children as I pursued my master’s and doctorate in English from the U. of…
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 about the civil rights movement in Mississippi, The Children Bob…
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 slightly older girl in geometry who borrowed my vanilla lip…
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 long enough to think I’d died. I never really had…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My family yanked me from Virginia and took me to Alabama when I was ten. Then they left me there when I was 18. I married a boy from Birmingham after getting my MFA from University of Alabama. Steal, steel, and still are homophones in half my…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in the South, raised and educated there, and still choose to live there. From my beginnings and my early perception of the world as I knew it, my political perspective has continually evolved over time. In many respects, if you examine the current political…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’ve lived South of the Mason-Dixon Line for over 30 years, going deeper South with each move. I save my bacon grease, fry my chicken in lard, and make a mean shrimp and grits. My Southern born and raised husband proclaims my cornbread is better than his…