Southern Legitimacy Statement: Sometime before 1630, Richard Willam Silvester got off a ship and set up a farm at the edge of the Dismal Swamp, He also built a house in the area around Norfolk, Virginia. About a hundred years later, Johannes Setzer left Heidelberg and ended up in Catawba…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and raised in Vance, Alabama, once a no-name town, now home to the Mercedes plant where everyone at one time worked or longed to work. I attended the University of Alabama and now live in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I’ve gone from living among the trees…

Southern legitimacy statement: Appalachian born and raised, I grew up in the foothills of Georgia on stories of ghosts, graveyards, and granny witches. Although I left those mountains years ago for the suburbs of Atlanta, I still hear them call to me — a reminder where I’ll always belong. The…

My Southern Legitimacy Statement is as follows: I was born and raised in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and I received my bachelor’s and master’s degrees from William Carey University. Right now, though, I am a school administrator in Bangkok, Thailand and have been in English education for 20 years. I write as…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: were I not in fact and in deed a native Southerner, I would not have cultivated my appreciation for the anachronistic, the ancient, the antique, the archaic, and the atavistic across my life and career. Although I have located to a western longitude in recent years, my…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am a southerner by way of my husband and having lived in the small North Carolina town where he was raised for more years than I can count. Have you ever eaten Liver Mush? Add Liver Mush to your diet and you will be southern in…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am from Virginia, lived in NYC for 25 years and North Jersey for 6, but do not like it. I miss Norfolk, which is sinking under the sea. I am as lonely as an Atlantean. Still Life I go out. I don’t remember how I got…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am from a little place called Harts in the coalfields of southern West Virginia. In Harts, we’re taught to speak with an accent that makes even other Southerns go “Where are you from?!” These days I live in the mountains of southwestern Virginia. The Daughter I…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: My friend Sam told if I’m tellin the truth I can wander around a little but if I’m puttin out a stretcher I better stick to the straight and narrow and repeat it exact. So I’m stickin to the truth, mostly. 1. I am The Bard of…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in the stench of the Gulf Coast refineries, raised in trailerhomes and white trash apartment complexes. My daddy got the calling to be a preacher but my momma didn’t get the calling to be a preacher’s wife, so she made him quit. Heart-Shaped Rock…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: My grandfather spent his twilight years drinking cognac and reliving the War. Initially Papa Jules had been assigned submarine duty. He was transferred to a desk job in Brussels after his submarine commander realized Papa spoke a peculiar kind of French. When Papa died we found hidden…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Dawn Corrigan lives in the Congressional district of Matt Gaetz. Help us, Obi-Wan Kenobi. Tomato Soup It arrived in May. Faye had tried to get some in April, but she’d lingered so long over the details of that order—adding a box of chips, removing a canister of…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Illinois against my will and fled that state for a better future in Texas. When family ask if I’ll ever return there, I can’t stop laughing at them, not with them. Why would I want to return to a place where it snows…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born and grew up in Mink Shoals, West Virginia. I love being in places with neat town names not found in the L.A. Times—most recently: Big Stick, Blue Jay 6, and Odd. Brown beans and cornbread might be my favorite meal. With wineberries for dessert. Will not…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am legitimately southern. Both sides of my family go back many generations in North Carolina. I live (and write) in Wilmington. Broken “It’s broken,” Mama said, as though Jim couldn’t see the handlebars for himself. “I told you to quit trying to do a wheelie. It’s…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Sunday mornings at our house it’s grits, red eye gravy, country ham, eggs over easy and buttermilk biscuits. (Please don’t tell my doctor.) I’ve walked 3 miles to a one room schoolhouse taught by an 18-year old girl with one year of business school and lots of…

I have a Master of Arts in Teaching from Lee University which is in Cleveland, TN, to establish my Southern Legitimacy… to further cement my southern roots, I was born in Columbia, SC, raised, largely, in Oklahoma and Texas, and lived in Tennessee and Georgia for a significant portion of…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: A graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, I am a native Atlantan born to a father also raised in Atlanta and a mother from small-town northern Florida. I spent many childhood summer days either swimming in a black water spring near the Suwanee River, or jumping into the frigid…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: My grandfather gave me my first chew of tobacco around the age of five, and I started hunting with a shotgun when I was eight. As for my interest in the Southern aesthetic, well, that probably began in about the fifth grade, when my buddy and I…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and have lived in the South when it was segregated, have seen the changes forged through the efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, have witnessed the flare ups ignited by racial inequities and injustices in the ensuing…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’m Southern California, born and raised, (learned to surf in high school P.E.). But my Dad’s parents came from big families in Oklahoma, leaving behind more relatives than he can count. My statement feels like a family reunion in blazing summer, light years from home; a house…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born and bred in Texas. If you see a guy trying not to lose his balance while walking across the cobblestone streets of Philadelphia in his cowboy boots, that would be me. The Oldest Barber in Texas His great-granddaughter hung a sign from his barber pole saying…

SOUTHERN LEGITIMACY STATEMENT When we unexpectedly showed up at Grandma’s house on any given Sunday, she would send one of my older brothers into the yard to catch a chicken or two. She was quicker and more efficient at wringing the chicken’s neck, so she would deftly, with a flick…

SOUTHERN LEGITIMACY STATEMENT When we unexpectedly showed up at Grandma’s house on any given Sunday, she would send one of my older brothers into the yard to catch a chicken or two. She was quicker and more efficient at wringing the chicken’s neck, so she would deftly, with a flick…