Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born about as far south as you can go without being in the Caribbean, and still people in Georgia tell me “Florida ain’t the south.” They said that crap when I lived in Texas too. Well, if fishing in a Louisiana bayou from a Jon…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I practiced law for 25 years and ran a public education literacy organization in Mississippi for 15 years. On the Doorstep of Bukowski’s America Sam is an artist. He paints big, messy, powerful paintings. We’ve been friends for decades but there’s rarely enough time. I don’t see…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: People say football is religion in the South. To me, it’s the other way around. You’re born into your team (church), listen to the coach or the announcers (preachers), sing the fight songs (hymns), and chow down at the concession stand (suppers and picnics). The pilgrims on…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: We were a prototypical southern nuclear family. My Papaw came up in the Great Smokey Mountains, near Farner, Tennessee and Cherokee, North Carolina. When he was nine, he lost track of the time one summer evening, squirrel hunting up on the mountain, and he avoided a sound…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Richmond, Virginia and still live there. My momma was from Franklin County and grew up on bootleg money. My daddy’s from Johnson City, Tennessee. When it’s warm I try to jump in the James River once a day. As a kid, before I…

SOUTHERN LEGITIMACY STATEMENT I’ve lived in Louisiana for five years: I earned my MFA at McNeese State University, am working on a PhD in Rhetoric at LSU, and I love being part of the poetry scene in Lafayette too. I’m a Cajun food addict, and could by now surely peel…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: We were a prototypical southern nuclear family. My Papaw came up in the Great Smokey Mountains, near Farner, Tennessee and Cherokee, North Carolina. When he was nine, he lost track of the time one summer evening, squirrel hunting up on the mountain, and he avoided a sound…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Have long been a fan of William Faulkner‘s writing and attended the first annual Faulkner conference in Oxford at the University of Mississippi. I am pretty sure that had Faulkner spent a little more time in Italy in 1925 that he would surely have written at least…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’m a bonafide southern fried hunting and fishing machine. I’ve gotten up before dawn and bagged an 8’ gator, went right up to dusk to put an arrow in the heart of a tusky razorback, and I’ve got a few ten pointers mounted on the basement wall….

Southern Legitimacy Statement: … grew up between the poor cotton farms and the Ozarks–both of Arkansas. She is a dog lover, tree hugger, nature activist, and defender of children and animals. 10 Step Directions to My Home Walk barefoot with a bobber-rigged cane pole down the dirt road cutting through…

Here’s my Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in the Volunteer State, lived my first year and a half in the Magnolia State, and then moved to LA (Lower Alabama, that is). There I spent twelve formative years in a remote outpost on the fringes of the modern world where…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I trust you consider South Florida, where this piece of flash fiction is set, part of the South. I do. I am an established Cuban American writer with poetry, fiction, nonfiction and even a cookbook. Alligator Sam The lovers named the gator Sam, after Samuel Grossman who…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I used to read a lot. I am old now and write. Spittin We were standing there spittin, me-n-Tom-n Joey-n-my older brother John and other brother we were spitting at a rock. Jeez we were bored, Joey spit at the rock, a pretty good spit that missed…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I like the soft, lazy, sweet summer heat. Act One (Always) I woke up and the air seemed to be pulling away from me. My lips were dry, and my lungs were burning. The early sunlight seemed artificial, something manufactured for effect, not for nurturing the earth….

Southern Statement: I am not a native Southerner, but I can tell you that the eight years I lived in eastern North Carolina gave me what I needed to become one. Someone told me I could tell a story. Someone else put a guitar in my hand. Someone handed me…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: My later years bring me full-circle, back to near the one-stoplight East Texas town where I grew up. Farms and small communities, with their Dairy Queens, antique stores, and half- boarded-up Main Streets, seem to have a stronger literary pull than the concrete jungles of some of…

My Southern Legitimacy Statement I moved to a small farm on Virginia’s Eastern Shore in 2004 on which I put a conservation easement. The community of woods, pond, fields and salt marsh will be forever protected from the ravages of development and industrialized chicken farming flooding in from the north….

Southern legitimacy statement: I remember being 10-years old and sneaking out of my 15-year-old cousin’s house to “borrow” my aunt’s car for a late night feed at a White Castle in Florida. The Note Squatting over the pit in the rain you have one thought: Do. Not. Lose. Your. Balance. …

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up on a farm in Virginia and, although I haven’t lived in the South since college, still hold a fondness for all things made with Duke’s Mayonnaise and anything with a little extra salt like VA Ham and Hubs Peanuts.  I also spent a summer…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I attended public schools in Selma (AL), Ocean Springs (MS), Goldsboro (NC), Niceville (FL) and Benton (AR), and I can sing all three verses of the Georgia Tech fight song even though I only lasted three quarters there. I also dated a Buck Swamp Kicking Clogger for…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I live in a rural Virginia county where Robert E. Lee spent the night on his way to Appomattox. I make cornbread and fry okra, and live two miles from where Thomas Jefferson designed a home for a poor cousin, a younger son. I want statues removed,…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was raised in Dallas Texas but went out on my on at fourteen; joined the army at 15 and was in jail by 17. I learned a lot while in jail. I learned how to slip out of hand-cuffs and slide down a bunch of tied…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Texas born. Texas raised. Anyone not born in Texas is a Yankee in my book. I think that about covers it. Surely Not the Likeness What’s the easiest way to make a city boy holler? Turn off his air conditioner. A city boy can’t stand having his…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Augusta Georgia, in the same hospital where my father was born, in the same town where my father’s parents still lived, where one great grandparent still lived, and where I grew up and raised my own family. I’m still here. I lived a…