Donna Orchard: Highway 61 Road Trip
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My creative non fiction piece is about sister and I touring an historic blues corridor, Highway 61, through Mississippi looking for the music.
John Lane – Three Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Much of my genetic material has been circulating between the blue Southern sea and the Blue Ridge for over 200 years. (My sister, an obsessive genealogist, can certify this.) A few family names: Mary Caldonia Behealer, Christopher Columbus
Bradley (“Lum”), Walter Scott Lane, Aunt Lottie Belle. will send my mother’s pinto bean recipe upon request.
June Poets
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Does being a vegetarian disqualify me from being “southern”? I have accepted grits, cornbread, okra, and ridiculously sweet iced tea, but I can’t abide collards and barbeque. I don’t have loquacious uncles spinning yarns at huge family reunions or eccentric aunties that out-butter Paula Deen. All I have is a developed love of the land as I have lived over half my life now in North Carolina. I have hiked in the Great Smokies and splashed off the Outer Banks. I have gardened in the Piedmont’s red clay and in the flat sand of the coastal plain. Elizabeth City is the fourth NC city for me, trending eastward from High Point. A remnant of the Great Dismal Swamp is in my back yard along with the Pasquotank River. They inspired these poems.
Poetry
Essays
