Southern Legitimacy Statement: Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and raised in Georgia and that’s where I’ve returned. I’ve worked at Southern newspapers. And I enjoy mater sandwiches each summer using tomatoes grown at home. Shooting Stars Preferred Mike wanted to discover a new planet or comet. Everybody was finding…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I see a funeral, a widow, her daughter, and her son telling her what uncle did to … Bunched Together I want you to consider for a moment –You walk into the Trident Health Center’s specialty clinic and smell sugar from the cakes and cookies, which, for…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: There’s nothing that steeps a Southerner in their own Southerness quite like living outside of the South. Having grown up in Memphis, I now live in Southern California, where, every day, it seems, I have to explain my Delta accent. I hold fiercely to my Southerness as…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: …[A]nd 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 my adult life. Hope my southern credentials are up to snuff! At the Edge There is an…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: My parents grew up West Virginia hillbillies, but moved to Pennsylvania (for my dad’s job), where I was born. In North Carolina since age six, for sixty years now, I’ve hailed from the South—North Carolina, Georgia, and currently, Tennessee. When I first came south, I never expected…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am so Southern I capitalize it. I am so Southern, every Sunday my dad would drive us out to the country to see the old home place where he had a pet pig and ate turnips on the way home from school. I am so Southern…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I attended Tulane University and lived and worked in New Orleans upon completion of my studies. From an apartment by the Fairgrounds, in the middle 1990s, I published the avant-garde literary magazine, Mystery Itch. Mentally, I never left the city. “In Old Illinois” My mother has lost…

Southern Legitimacy Statement : Southern Legitimacy Statement: Though born and raised in Toledo, Ohio, where I started my writing career for a small music magazine, I have lived in rural Virginia with my husband and two children for the last four years. It’s now my home, and my favorite place…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am originally from Memphis, Tennessee where I attended school from 2nd to 12th grades, at Memphis Campus School and White Station High. After college, I moved to Florida where I am now retired. The Queen’s Skin I, too, am dying to find out why the Queen’s…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Native of NC. Currently reside in Clemmons, NC with my lovely wife Jill. Lived and studied in Paris and Dijon for a year and a half before graduating from Wake Forest. Three novels published. The latest: A WALKING SHADOW (Unsolicited Press) 2018. Go to US Review of…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am probably one of the few people here who did not grow up in the South so please don’t hold it against me. My wife and I originally had our honeymoon here just on a whim, but after vacationing down here in South Carolina (James Island,…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and raised in Texas. According to my grandmother, I am a descendant of one of the families who founded San Patricio, Texas Average Working People Are Not Average A compassionate friend once said to me,over a cup of steaming herbal tea,“Are artists really the…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I live in Charlottesville Virginia. Today is the 12th of August. That statue is still there. And it shouldn’t. The Monument I used to be the statue thatpeople respected and looked at;but now I am the source of shameas all my friends forget my name. There was…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Like many southerners, my mother grew up on a farm and canned a lot of food. Unfortunately aluminum pressure cookers were used on their farm and they canned tomatoes which are acidic. This lead to my mother having aluminum dementia as mentioned in the story. A Fond…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Texas is considered “the south,” right? I sure hope so… I wrote this little story on the back of high school football, the King in Texas. A football game in a small town can bring even the most divided of communities together. Some of my favorite memories…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born near the swamp of Houston, Texas and the summertime there still makes me feel like I’m drowning on land. Although it’s not the prettiest beach, I would still run to Galveston often as a college freshman when I needed the solace of the ocean’s…

Southern Legitimacy Statement I’m in the north of Feria, a village in the foothills of the Sierra Morena. It’s the last street before the hill rises up to the castle… but, hey!!! It’s not all going north. I’m in the south of the province of Extremadura, and Extremadura is in…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: For ten generations now my ancestors have lived in the mountains of southwestern Virginia. Great-great-great-great Granddaddy (briefly) lived in Kentucky, until a posse chased him back across the Virginia state line where he (and we) stayed. We eat cornbread, never grits. The Ballad of Lockhart’s Mule: An…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: My people settled the Territory South of the River Ohio, which later took the name ‘Tennessee.’ (Before they were Tennesseans, they were North Carolinians and Virginians.) I can whittle in a tilted-back chair on the front porch, use a tissue-paper comb to keep a tune, and make…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Though the son of a Wedding DJ and the product of a place on the outskirts of Orlando, Florida, I was raised on collard greens, snap peas from my Papa’s garden and fellowship fried chicken after Sunday service at Grandma’s house. If I ever was thirsty I…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Bogotá, Colombia. I lived in South Carolina for almost a decade. I earned a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of South Carolina (the original USC), before moving to Clinton, where I worked for a year. I currently live in Bogotá, but…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: It’s the language around me that reminds me that I’m in the south. My sister is always fixin’ to do or to go somewhere. She used to live down the street from the POlice Station. Hell’s Bells my mother didn’t give a hot damn what the Sam…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born north of the Mason-Dixon line, but with a Southern spirit. Now I’m happily settled where Southern red cedar bedecked in Spanish moss shares the landscape with live oaks and cabbage palms—Florida,the land of flowers, where it’s harder to stop something from growing than to…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in New York with dyed-in-the wool Southern parents. They arrived in the city during The Depression determined “to make it,” as my father said, and they did. But they brought along with them the unwritten Southern rulebook of “shoulds” and expectations, which I called…