Category: Poetry

Southern Legitimacy Statement: . I was born and raised for twenty-one years in a little town of less than 2,000 people known as Vancleave, Mississippi. There wasn’t ever much to do there growing up if you weren’t a fan of...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: My family is from Texarkana, Tx: my great-greats, greats, grands, mother and sister. I was born in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed, “nowhere Zen New Jersey” and grow up working of my step-father’s azelea and rhododendron...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Norfolk, Virginia and grew up in nearby Virginia Beach. Spent lots of time in Gloucester VA where my mom grew up. Summers almost always involved a two-week trip to the Blue Ridge. If...

My Southern Legitimacy Statement : My parents began our family in Virginia, where I learned can’t never could, my mother gave me my druthers, and plans relied on if the creek don’t rise. Later we moved to Southbend Indiana, and...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Valdosta, Georgia. My grandfather was more tied to the mythos of the South than my parents were. My grandfather said at the kitchen table one time, “Your grandmother is a Yankee [from Ohio],”...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Fayetteville, Arkansas is my home. I grew up here and then was gone for a very long time. But I came back to live here again and to research and write. I’m a local historian, a novelist,...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: When we think of the south, those of us who are older remember sitting on porches to visit or to help others string beans when the crop was in. Our house, in southwestern Virginia, faced a street...

My SLS varies with my mood and the moon. Sometimes I think about how race relations and people’s perspectives have and have not changed. Sometimes it’s as simple as what’s on the table for dinner. Sometimes it’s about the overarching...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Native to Virginia and long-resident in Georgia, I’m as Southern as Southern can be. (Let’s not talk about the seven-year stretch in New Jersey.) A prominent Mid-Western poet once told me during a workshop, “I could listen...