SLS: I was born in Arkansas, and I'll probably die there too. These days, I teach at an Arkansas university, in a small town on the edge of the Ozarks. Some day, I'll move for good to Newton County, still as deep as the backwoods get, and revert to a life governed by seasons instead of clocks.

Southern Legitimacy Statement Both my parents hail from the South. When they married, my mother's family called it a "mixed" marriage because she was from Alabama, and he was a Texan. Almost a different country, as far as they were concerned. I was born in the middle of a blizzard in Fairbanks, Alaska, the daughter of a father who was in the Army Air Corps. Alaska was then just a territory, but by virtue of my parents being southerners, and military people, I was born a Southerner. A misplaced Southerner, but a bona fide one. When my grandfather died on his farm in Alabama, we moved to the farm to help grandmother, who wanted to keep to her farming ways. It was there I learned how to make grits, how to hitch up a mule, how to pick cotton and dig potatoes. I was never very good at milking the cows, so my morning chore was gathering the eggs--and I was afraid of the pecking hens, but too afraid of my father's wrath, NOT to do this. We had an outhouse until my father built a real, in-house bathroom, and my momma got to have the first flushing rights. I learned from an uncle how to find the stars, from an aunt how to make perfect sweet tea, from my grandmother how to "put up" canned fruits and vegetables, and from my momma how to use plants and trees for medicine. My great-uncle offered to teach us kids how to make homemade wine, but this never happened. And from my father and brother, I learned how to play chess, hunt and fish. I guess that all makes me Southern, and I feel real pity for people who don't understand anything I've written here.

SLS: a half-Ukrainian redneck poet, backwoods feminist, farm hand, adjunct instructor of English-- basically a Jill-of-all-trades-mistress-to-none hailing from Mathias, WV.