
Scott Beard :: Rising Fog ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I wish all these people from California would stop moving here. Rising Fog Born in a back alley on a Thursday, my nativity predisposed me to drinking; but I can’t say it had anything to do with...

Katheryn Krotzer Laborde :: Off Balance ::
SLS: My mother was from Richmond, though I think she was born in Lynchburg. Because my father was from Philly, I grew up thinking I was the product of a mixed marriage. I lived here and there (Virginia, Tennessee, Texas)...

Kevin Brown :: Three Poems ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I currently live in Nashville (questionable as to the Southerness these days, but I’ll still go with it), and I’ve grown up and spent most of my life in Tennessee (outside Chattanooga; the Northeast corner; born in...

Edward Burke :: Texas Experiment in Mortuary Science ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’ve been south of south for so long I can’t even remember the last time I saw Ursas Major or Minor, I guess they’re still up there somewhere. The quantum perturbations at whatever latitude I’m in are...

Alissa C. Miles :: Bone Edge ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in South Carolina wishing for snow in the winters and shoving my toes in the pluff mud on the banks of marshes during the summer. My family ties stretch across this corn-flake-shaped state, from...

Cecil Geary :: The Dead Mule ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in Kentucky, Southern Indiana and Southern California. My family is from Grayson County, Kentucky which is the setting for most of my stories. The Dead Mule Charlie Drucker stood at the edge of the...

Grey Brown :: Black Irish, The Second Coming, My Oldest Sister Gets Married ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Rocky Mount, NC, home to Melton’s Barbeque and the Tar River. One Saturday, my family took the ski boat out on the Tar River, but never again. When you swam in the Tar,...

Juan Cruz :: A Morning in Bogotá ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Bogotá, Colombia. I moved to the US when I was in my twenties. I lived in South Carolina for almost a decade. I earned a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of...

Kay Jenkins :: Marie Margan ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Not a bone in my body is non-southern. Brought up by my grandparents, whose people spent a hundred and fifty years moving south from the Northern Neck of Virginia through North and South Carolina. Finally, in the...

Amita Basu :: Escape Plan ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Here in South India, filter coffee is the norm. This is not just a method of brewing coffee — using a pair of cylindrical steel vessels, the top vessel containing a filter — but also a type...

John Frame :: A Real Job ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I spent a year living in Charlotte, North Carolina between 1996 and 1997, teaching at UNC-Charlotte and conducting historical research with the help of scholarships from Nations Bank and the St. Andrew’s Society of North Carolina. There...

Monica Viera :: Fighting the Death Instinct ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Monica Viera lived in the 7th ward in New Orleans after getting accepted into a writing commune. She lived in a shotgun house and warded off crackheads on her walk to work in the French Quarter. Fighting...

Janie Borisov :: The Islands of Weed and Mushrooms ::
*Hello hello! So I live in Australia, south of just about everywhere (aka the Butt of the World). Having spent the bulk of my adult years travelling, I like to muse about my wanderings. This piece is about the southernmost...