Category: Poetry

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born by coal oil lamplight in a tin-roofed farmhouse 6 miles outside Liberty, Mississippi. I list logging, plowing a mule, picking cotton and working in a country store in my resume. Learned to swim in...

My Southern Legitimacy is that I used to work towboats out of exotic ports such as Fouchon and Houma. There I developed a lifelong thirst for sweet tea and gumbo done right. If that isn’t enough legitimacy, I understand. Not...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: The folks below were born in Alabama, Louisiana, and North Carolina. Unless there is a statute of limitations on the Southern Legitimacy Statement I sent you in 2016 when you kindly published my “Mule Toe” poem, I...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born by coal oil lamplight in a tin-roofed farmhouse 6 miles outside Liberty, Mississippi. I list logging, plowing with a mule, picking cotton and working in a country store in my resumé. Learned to swim in...

Acknowledgments This chapbook is dedicated to self. The first 33 poems were written in the Old Capital of China, Xi’an, in 2016 and the last few poems were composed at the immigration hospital in the city of Columbia, South Carolina,...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in Easley, South Carolina, and now reside in Hendersonville, North Carolina. The closest I came to living in the northeast was when I lived in Maryland, and I lived there only a few months....

Southern Legitimacy Statement: My poetry focuses on my small hometown in Central Florida, celebrating the natural, beautiful, strangeness of the people and place that shaped me; the portion of the state that often goes unnoticed. Crystal and Walt I. Crystal...

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...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in the south; the south of Nicosia, Cyprus. Intercommunal conflict has marked my birth place as the last divided capital in the world. Growing up, I was not permitted to cross to the other...

My Southern Legitimacy Statement follows: My mother had me in a Baptist hospital in Knoxville, Tennessee, and my father almost missed my birth because he was watching the Andy Griffith Show. I was raised in a house that had a...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am not born and bred but I have lived in the South–and if being an authentic individual is what the South is about–then I am Southern. Also, my son was born about as deep down as...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Jeff is a musician, educator, and author from Huntsville, AL. He enjoys time alone to think and pursue creative projects, but not as much as he enjoys a good cup of coffee with his wife, Amy. The...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: John Dorroh’s Irish ancestors reached the shores of South Carolina a few hundred years ago, and began migrating to the west and south. County Antrim is well-represented by the Dorroh lineage. After traveling the world as an...