Southern Legitimacy Statement: Sunday mornings at our house it’s grits, red eye gravy, country ham, eggs over easy and buttermilk biscuits. (Please don’t tell my doctor.) I’ve walked 3 miles to a one room schoolhouse taught by an 18-year old girl with one year of business school and lots of…

My Southern Legitimacy Statement: Like some odd hybrid, I was born in Pensacola, Florida to a New York Irish Marine pilot and his Virginia bride—but raised in Pittsburgh. Yet after six years in the Marine Corps (itself an odd hybrid—as if the urban Northeast and rural South had a baby)…

My Southern Legitimacy Statement : My parents began our family in Virginia, where I learned can’t never could, my mother gave me my druthers, and plans relied on if the creek don’t rise. Later we moved to Southbend Indiana, and finally to Southern California. As an adult I married a…

Here’s my Southern Legitimacy Statement: I lived and worked in New Orleans for five years, from 2014-2019, including stints as a semi-pro poker player, a nonprofit fundraiser, Tulane University’s debate coach, and an overnight Uber driver (some of these overlapped). Ever since, I’ve been pursuing my MFA in West Virginia,…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I have almost always lived in the South (Southern Maryland, Southern India, Southern Florida, and Southern California). Give me an afternoon under live oak trees dripping with swaying Spanish moss, sweet tea, and a good book, and I’ll be happy. Humidity? Bring it on. It’s just part…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Valdosta, Georgia. My grandfather was more tied to the mythos of the South than my parents were. My grandfather said at the kitchen table one time, “Your grandmother is a Yankee [from Ohio],” marking her as different somehow, and her within earshot washing…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am as Southern as grits, biscuits, and gravy, having the double blessing of being brought into this world in the great state of Georgia (Atlanta to be precise) and having my raising in the Volunteer State of Tennessee. I have been educated here and have worked…

I have a Master of Arts in Teaching from Lee University which is in Cleveland, TN, to establish my Southern Legitimacy… to further cement my southern roots, I was born in Columbia, SC, raised, largely, in Oklahoma and Texas, and lived in Tennessee and Georgia for a significant portion of…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: A graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, I am a native Atlantan born to a father also raised in Atlanta and a mother from small-town northern Florida. I spent many childhood summer days either swimming in a black water spring near the Suwanee River, or jumping into the frigid…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: My grandfather gave me my first chew of tobacco around the age of five, and I started hunting with a shotgun when I was eight. As for my interest in the Southern aesthetic, well, that probably began in about the fifth grade, when my buddy and I…

I know what it feels like to walk barefooted behind my daddy while he plows that red Georgia clay on a hot summer day. That fresh turned dirt was cool on my feet, and a feeling like no other for a little boy. You can’t go back in time but…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: We’re so southern, we visit family and friends, outside, ten feet apart, on our big old front porch. We wash our hands, we wear masks, and we are always socially distant. It’s hard not to hug, it hurts not to pat someone on the back but by…

Why do we read? Neil Gaiman says we read fiction because it can show you a different world. One essential “function of fiction in human life” he says, lies in “its ability to introduce us to different versions of the world by envisioning alternate possibilities for the way things are.”…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and have lived in the South when it was segregated, have seen the changes forged through the efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, have witnessed the flare ups ignited by racial inequities and injustices in the ensuing…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and lived twenty years in Knoxville, Tennessee where I spent many evenings Agee-style with the saw of cicadas and the scent of hose water on hot grass. As an adolescent, there was nothing I wanted more than to leave the place for some far-flung…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’m Southern California, born and raised, (learned to surf in high school P.E.). But my Dad’s parents came from big families in Oklahoma, leaving behind more relatives than he can count. My statement feels like a family reunion in blazing summer, light years from home; a house…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born and bred in Texas. If you see a guy trying not to lose his balance while walking across the cobblestone streets of Philadelphia in his cowboy boots, that would be me. The Oldest Barber in Texas His great-granddaughter hung a sign from his barber pole saying…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in south-central South Dakota. My maternal great grandfather’s family came from Nodaway County, Missouri named after the Nodaway River that flows south. My home town is Mission, population less than a thousand, the largest city on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation. I have not…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Fayetteville, Arkansas is my home. I grew up here and then was gone for a very long time. But I came back to live here again and to research and write. I’m a local historian, a novelist, and a poet. Some of my work is set in…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: “I am a Chicago native who lived in New Orleans for brief stints (the longest being nine months in duration) at various times during my twenties. Since I was a restless vagabond gal, I constantly moved and traveled to places where I thought I might get a…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up n a small town on the Kentucky-Tennessee border where elections were determined by which politician passed out the most half-pints of liquor. When we were kids we got paid 50 cents a piece to pass out Seagram’s Seven and Coronal Lee. When we weren’t…

SOUTHERN LEGITIMACY STATEMENT When we unexpectedly showed up at Grandma’s house on any given Sunday, she would send one of my older brothers into the yard to catch a chicken or two. She was quicker and more efficient at wringing the chicken’s neck, so she would deftly, with a flick…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: When we think of the south, those of us who are older remember sitting on porches to visit or to help others string beans when the crop was in. Our house, in southwestern Virginia, faced a street where we could watch cars pass, sometimes with people we…

My SLS varies with my mood and the moon. Sometimes I think about how race relations and people’s perspectives have and have not changed. Sometimes it’s as simple as what’s on the table for dinner. Sometimes it’s about the overarching kindness you find and share through even casual acquaintances. Sometimes…