Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’ve been cogitating Southern Lit for over sixty years, from the time I was a student of Donald Davidson, one of them Fugitive guys at Vanderbilt. (I was also on a fancy literary panel with John Crowe Ransom. Wrote a poem for Allen Tate which he said,…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in the Cumberland Mountains in the Heart of Appalachia on Virginia’s Crooked Road near the border of Tennessee, Kentucky and North Carolina. My dad was a tobacco farmer, my brothers were loggers, and my uncle died of Black Lung Disease from his work in…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’ve lived at the margins for some time, within the southern sections of northern territories that is. I went to school in Southern Connecticut and now I live in the Southern Tier of upstate New York. As if I was planted, just above my own navel, when…

My Southern legitimacy statement is as follows: I received a BA in creative writing at Penn State prior to moving to Chincoteague, VA and working as a house painter. Finding that career much too difficult, I moved to Greensboro, NC and received an MA in Theatre at UNCG. My writing…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born and raised in Mississippi and never lived anywhere else. Bipolar Poetry Kindling Every guy I write is you. I type your name and delete it, type and delete and type and delete. (Google is my only confidante) You’re in my brain imprinted just like a flame…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: My Pap was named after the family’s most stubborn mule: Bud. He went by Bud all his life. THREE POEMS Shelter My cat won’t let me hug her, and now I know how my aunt feels when she gets to pettin’ on me, a grown man. Our…

Southern Legitimacy Statement Some writers question the right of Texans to claim they are part of the South. I claim that right because only a southerner would write about grandmothers who warn their grand children to not go into the one stall in the bathroom because only “coloreds” go there….

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Gainesville, Georgia, and raised in Flowery Branch with a Southern-Belle attitude to prove it. At my granny’s house, gossip may as well be a side dish during Sunday lunch. When I am not writing poetry, you can find me quoting Flannery O’Connor and Eudora…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: crawl of the Mississippi Delta, Heath has emerged as a contemporary poetic voice. He has been published in numerous literary journals for both poetry and fiction. He resides in the country just north of the southern roads he once called home. Southern Virtues I ride through the…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and raised south of Interstate 10 to a mother named Juanita, who was born and raised in the Appalachians, in Blacksburg, Virginia. I am distantly related to Addison Caldwell, the first cadet at Virginia Tech in the 1860s. My uncles Harlan and Clarence had…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was drawn to Dead Mule for its deep investment in carrying on the tradition of that dense humid- backcountry writing made visible by Faulkner and O’ Connor and Toomer. Two Poems Backwater Prayer for John Today, like every day, I feel nicotine shooting through me. I…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Gerry who’s worked as a healthcare consultant in Nashville, partied with relatives living in Greensboro and stayed awhile in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Lunacy 1. VARIATIONS ON SHRINK  [3] i.Cut And Dried Martinized Lingo?   One school of talk therapy Uses a few covert codes (Often overthought) About…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Richmond, Virginia. I play drums in a band called Wrinkle Neck Mules. We recorded part of an album in Helen, Georgia. And I play drums in one called Chamomile & Whiskey, too. We’re about to record in Nashville. I love the South, in…

SOUTHERN LEGITIMACY STATEMENT: I’ve lived in Louisiana for a handful of years, and I’m now working on a PhD in English (Rhetoric and Composition) at LSU. In my time here, I’ve tried many different gas stations’ boudin (they always have the BEST boudin. My favorite: Nonc Kev’s in Rayne); done…

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 an Amite River swimming hole–no lessons. My uncle went to…

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 everyone can be genuine Southern. Three Poems THE ACE HOTEL…

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 am opting out of this requirement. I have lived at…

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 an Amite River swimming hole–no lessons. My uncle went to…

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, U.S.A. in April 2017. During my harshest time in Xi’an,…

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. All In a Day’s Work Candy Bar I entered the…

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 Says She’s Not in Denial I’m never going to tell…

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 to you read the phone book.” Three Poems Idlewild The…

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 side of my city. Since the opening of the border…

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 creek in the backyard and a picture of Elvis on…