Felicia Mitchell: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
How many people can claim to have had a pet roach as a child? I can. For all kinds of reasons, that confession has to legitimize my southern roots. What else can it say? The roach lived in a mayonnaise jar in my closet for a little while, and then it died. I became a poet at an early age. Eventually my mother let bring a kitten home from next door.
Norvin Dickerson: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was conceived on a houseboat on the Ashley River in Charleston, South Carolina and was born in Monroe, North Carolina first year of the Baby Boomers. I got my undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. My kin, Irish immigrants to North and South Carolina, fought for the Confederacy. I drive miles out of my way to eat Lexington Barbeque, and belong to a band of pirates and sailors, Brothers of the Coast, located in Savannah, Georgia. I live in the town of Black Mountain in western North Carolina.
Terri Kirby Erickson: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
When some of the phrases you remember hearing in your childhood are: “I swannee,” “Bless your heart,” and “Law have mercy,” you were probably brought up in the South. So, I reckon I’m Southern enough to suit The Mule!
Anderson O’Brien: Three Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Biscuits every Sunday morning: Preheat oven to 450. 2 cups flour, ¼ tsp baking soda, 1 TBSP baking powder and 1 tsp salt in the blue pottery bowl Mama gave me. Cut 6 TBSP butter into chunks and cut into flour, add 1 cup buttermilk, easy now, moisten until JUST combined. Turn dough onto the old board, perfectly floured. Gently pat biscuits out and cut into rounds. Bake 10-12 minutes. Serve with salted ham, eggs lightly scrambled, fried apples, and, of course, fresh tomatoes. Every Southern girl knows how to make a Southern breakfast.
Malaika King Albrecht: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I've lived in the South nearly all my life. My crawfish boils will clear your sinuses for a week, and I will put just about anything in my fridge into the pot. Though I don't know about mules, I know that horses make 50 pounds of poop each day, which I have to scoop from their pasture.
Alice Osborn: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born below the Mason-Dixon Line in Washington, D.C., a North/South limbo gumbo to a French mother who hated Southern France and a father who loved Charleston thanks to his long gone Citadel days. My dad’s Beaufort, SC ancestors fought in Petersburg in the War of Northern Aggression and his grandfather has an elementary school named for him on Parris Island. I am a Southern girl because way before I lived in Charleston and Myrtle Beach I knew I had a high humidity tolerance and felt comfortable driving without hubcaps. I still know how to avoid all of the sketchy roads in Charleston and I’m mistaken for a native by the tourists every time I visit this fine city—it must be my floppy straw hat and blue flip flops. Today as a Tar Heel I’m hopelessly addicted to bacon, I freak while driving in snow, and I love to spin tales that may not have a point.
Gail Peck: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I am a proud Virginian, the Dogwood state. If I was going to get switched, it wasn’t going to be from a branch of the dogwood. And I did get switched on occasion because my grandmother believed, “Spare the rod, and spoil the child.” She had to make up for Poppie’s lack of discipline. He’d let me play Barbershop and lather his head with Old Spice, and taught me Solitaire which he played by pulling his chair to the bedside, the cards laid across the peacock bedspread. He scooped out oysters from the stew so I could savor the liquid. We ate jelly-roll cake together. When Granny’s day ended, we sat on the porch swinging, the morning glories closed by now. She played the harmonica and, Tango, the dog howled. That old house still stands, and beside it the apple tree I climbed.
Dale Wisely: “The Woods Unbounded”
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I have eaten fried squirrel, instructed by my parents to be careful to avoid the lead shot.
I can detect a phony Southern accent on TV or in movies in three-quarters of a second. Shockingly, almost no non-Southern actor can master one. Not even DeNiro or Streep.
Melissa Dickson: Five Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born in the South, raised in the South, left the South, and came on back to the South. I capitalize South. Margaret Mitchell grew up playing on land her great-grandparents bought from my great-great grandparents. If you go back far enough the Dickson's and the Dixon's are the same dang folk. My first book was half-about the Civil War. I know how to make cornbread without looking at a recipe and it doesn't have sugar in it. I think that's a Yankee thang. At least I know a Yankee who puts sugar in his cornbread.
Paul Corman Roberts: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Does the Southwest count? My grandfather was one of the original dust bowl Oakies who found a home for himself, and eventually his family in Los Angeles where I was born in 1967 before moving to Northern California at age 4, and then later as an young adult I lived in Las Vegas NV for five years. Otherwise I spent six weeks at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio Texas and four weeks at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi Mississippi. I know what it is to be hot and swarmed by bugs the size of mice. I understand the pointlessness of drying off after a shower in the Gulf Coast region during summer. And to this day, I can't turn down the biscuits and gravy on any menu anywhere, especially if the gravy has alligator sausage.
Jane Andrews: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
A daughter and granddaughter of women christened “Dixie” I was called Dixie by my father for three days, until my mother came out of the anesthesia and said, “Bless her little heart, I can’t do that to her.” Both my parents were born in Raleigh, NC. Their parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and so on back into the humid mists of time were Tarheels. We know how to suck the sweet from honeysuckles, how to soothe a bee sting with tobacco, when to flip a pillow to sleep on the cool side, and the charm of talc-soft red dirt stirred into a dust devil by a Chevy Impala on an unpaved road. Unlike the colonists from above the Mason-Dixon Line, I know “ma’am” is not just for addressing the elderly and that “barbeque” is a noun, not a verb. I also know that your mama’s sister’s husband’s children’s offspring are your cousins. And that you and I are also probably cousins of some degree. Who are your people?
Robert E. Wood: Three Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I married into the South, have in-laws named Bibba and Boots, prefer Waffle House to Eggs Benedict and never use y'all as a singular form of address. That's about the best a Brooklyn boy has to bring to the table (and I will show up at that table for greens and fried okra).
M. S. Palmer: Three Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
My grandmother used to talk about Louisiana and the heat and the humidity and how her brother would take his boat into the swamps and pull catfish the size of dogs right up out of the water with his bare hands and when she married my grandfather born in Chicago they spent a miserable year down there before moving away never going back.
Poetry
Essays
