Sara Whitestone “An Outsider’s View of Guns…”
Any woman who can bake a crawfish pie--and enjoy eating it--should be counted a Southerner no matter where she lives.
Becky Meadows “Three Seconds”
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up on my grandmother and grandfather’s farm, where we ate fried potatoes, green beans (cooked for an entire day or more on the stove in a pot), and cornbread. Fried chicken was a treat we enjoyed, and it was really fried—not the carbon-copy fried chicken found frozen in stores today. We ate tomatoes from the garden (straight from the garden). My southern heritage isn’t limited to food, though—I have the most marvelous southern accent that I have refused to relinquish for academia. I’m proud of my heritage!
Mark Pegram “Moonshine in Piedmont North Carolina”
Some Lovely Creative Non-Fiction. Enjoy … Moonshine Piedmont North Carolina Intro Nick Pegram, Nicholas Talley Pegram, my grandfather was born in the Piedmont of North Carolina 1864 during the height of the Civil War. He was six generations from his...
Jackson Culpepper “Judgment House”
SLS: Growing up in south Georgia, I have a Stockholm Syndrome-type relationship to temperatures over ninety degrees and one hundred percent humidity. But the devil can have his damned gnats.
Erin Kelly “Sound No Trumpet”
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I talk slow. I eat etouffee, jambalaya and boudin. I've clapped my hands to gospel in hot, crowded churches, and visited Catholic psychics. I've gone through many Louisiana winters in short sleeves and shorts.
Barbara Nishimoto “Identifying Trees”
Southern Literacy Statement
I was born and raised in the North, but now have lived most of my adult life in the South. When I first moved my mother acted as though I were moving to another country and told me all the stories she had collected from the tabloids she loved. When she visited during the summer she rolled and tied a hand towel around her head, a desperate hachimaki, and stuffed tissues around its edges to catch the sweat before it fell into her eyes and down her cheeks. “Eight o’clock at night is the same as three o’clock in the afternoon,” she said. “That’s why horses go crazy and impale themselves.”
John Davis, Jr. “The Legend(s) of Mailman George”
SLS: John Davis Jr. is a sixth-generation Florida native. His poetry has covered the South like kudzu, including a prior appearance in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. Now he's trying his hand at a little down-home fiction. He hopes yall like it.
Diane Thomas-Plunk “The Call”
SLS -- Born and raised in Memphis, Diane Thomas-Plunk is highly skilled in the three B's of Memphis -- blues, barbecue and beer. These may be enjoyed individually, in various pairings, or -- best yet -- all together.
Katherine La Mantia “Vines”
Southern Legitimacy Statement: In elementary school, a boy named Jedediah taught me how to drink the nectar from the honeysuckle blossoms by pinching the end of the flower. My mother stared at me for a full three seconds the first time she ever heard me say "yall." I stared at her even longer when I first heard her say it, too.
Poetry
Essays
