Candice Kelsey :: Relationship Smarts ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: About nine months ago, I left Los Angeles for Augusta, GA. My back yard pushes up against the Savannah River, and I awake most mornings to the…
Juan Cruz :: Open All Night ::
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…
Andrew Brasfield :: Green Top ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I live just outside of Birmingham, Alabama, across the creek from where I grew up. Despite spending eighteen years yelling “War Eagle” like my uncle and grandfather, I…
State of the Mule Address
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’m so southern, I created the southern legitimacy statement in 1996 when we first started publishing this literary journal. The requirement to send a “statement” seemed fun…
James Emery :: Yellow Sodbuster::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My South is dichotomy and contradiction. Trailers to million dollar homes. Homemade apple wine from Mason jars to bottles of bourbon from a call list. Dumplins and…
S.E.B. Detling :: On Choosing the Messages Adults Send to Children ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Given up for adoption in a one-light Tennessee town, I grew up in Memphis along the Mississippi River dancing ballet at the historic Orpheum Theatre and later…
David Kendall :: Resurrection of the Dead Mule
Southern Legitimacy Statement: A few years in Biloxi, Mississippi Near the coast of waters blue, I enjoyed the Southern hospitality From the local folks I knew. Hearts as big as…
Lisa Briley :: Healer ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born in Texas and raised in Mississippi, I spent my childhood hunting lotus and chasing fireflies. Though I moved around in my twenties, the South is in…
Tyler Robert Sheldon :: So What Happened Was, Or: The Ghost and the Bell ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’ve lived in Louisiana for a handful of years, and I’m now working on a PhD in English at LSU. In my time here, I’ve tried many…
Alexander Payne Morgan :: Cargo Cult ::
SOUTHERN LEGITIMACY: I lived all my life in Georgia until I graduated from the University of Georgia. My mother was born in Paducah, Kentucky, and her mother in Tennessee. My…
Les Brown :: Chicken House ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am a North Carolina free-range mountain farm boy. I crawled all over our Blue Ridge, swam with water snakes in the icy cold Stillhouse Branch, (that…
Edward Burke :: Marlovian Moment ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Edward Burke (dba strannikov) now lives for the second time in his life south of the Red River demarcating Texas from Oklahoma. He grew up in South…
Andrew Johnson :: Big Bottom Fish ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I visited the Asbury revival in Wilmore Kentucky for five days. The people there were hospitable and friendly, epitomizing Southern Charm. In the town and the city,…
Ruth Chapman Heinold :: Hearts Can Break
My mom died in 2010. She was my life. I find her writing when I search through boxes looking for winter scarves or thumb through an old cookbook of hers.…
Epiphany Ferrell :: The Amazing Chicken Man
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I live in Southern Illinois, emphasis on Southern. North of us is “downstate,” and sometimes they like to say they are Southern Illinois but they ain’t. Southern…
Danny Barbare :: Pisgah Mountain
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Basically, I’m 60, and I have never left the South. I went North one time to get vitamins. And Thanksgiving once. Other than that, I stayed stuck…
Ettore Cassetta :: Ghost Country
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My maternal grandfather was born in the south of the Marche region, southern Italy, in 1930. In 1948 he joined the Carabinieri Corps in hopes to find…
Adrienne Pilon :: Roots
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I live pretty far south of the Mason-Dixon line, in central North Carolina. Though I’m a transplant, I make a mean batch of chow-chow and a sublime…
Lee Ann Sontheimer Murphy :: Home Again
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am Southern by nature as well as birth. I like my tea sweet, spring finds me digging in the dirt to plant flowers and vegetable. I…
C.E. O’Banion :: Fire Ants
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born and raised in East Texas, I’ve lived in the bogs of southern culture my entire life. From a town with a Baptist church so big it…