Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up doing the same stupid things that all redneck Alabama kids do. When I got old enough, I jumped out of state for college and quickly learned that this big old world isn’t all cotton fields and red clay. Being Southern isn’t just an address,…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and raised in Missouri and now live (very, very) close to Atlanta. With the exception of college, I have spent my entire life in the South. Political Ads As per the recent changes in campaign laws stemming from the recent 2043, 9-to-6 SCOTUS ruling,…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Been a while, and this is not a good one. But when my parents stopped at a Dairy Queen on the way back from Florida, I went to get a drink since it was 90 +. There were two fountains. One had a line of about 50…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I like my tea sweet but not my cornbread. My great-great grandfather, his father and his uncles were with Lee when he surrendered at Appomattox. I learned those old stories from my great-grandmother, who we called Grandmammy. I’d rather eat red beans and rice than fancy French…

Southern Legitimacy Statement:  I was born in north Alabama to a mom from Alabama and a dad from Georgia. Even though I was raised in the north in southern Ohio, my southern legitimacy runs generationally deep.  I am sweet tea drinking, fried chicken eating, SEC loving gal!   I am…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I don’t know if any of my people were legitimate, but they were most certainly poor dirt farmers in the Carolinas back into the 1600’s. My folks consider sweet potato a vegetable, and salads wiggle like a hula girl’s hips. Is that a decent enough pedigree to…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: As I expressed three years prior, when you were so kind as to accept “The Neurosurgeon’s Rat,” my Southern legitimacy is honorary and based on my near-decade in Fayetteville with my wife and children as I pursued my master’s and doctorate in English from the U. of…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’ve lived South of the Mason-Dixon Line for over 30 years, going deeper South with each move. I save my bacon grease, fry my chicken in lard, and make a mean shrimp and grits. My Southern born and raised husband proclaims my cornbread is better than his…

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…