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…
"No good Southern writing is complete without a dead mule."
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…