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"Embracing [indigenous] societies as an essential part of southern history may confound the question ''Where is the South?'' but also asks provocatively, ''When is the South?''"

Native people and topics appear infrequently in much conventional southern history-even that which takes race and ethnicity as its primary lens. When they do appear, they often do so spectrally, are set apart from other subjects, and are presumed to have played only minor roles in the development of the field's big-ticket topics: slavery, the Civil War, and civil rights. Read on >

Image: The Great Migration South, by Hatty Ruth Miller, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 30, 2008.

For The Abolitionist South, we seek submissions that make visible a radical US South which has long envisioned a world without policing, prisons, or other forms of punishment. As PIC (prison industrial complex) abolitionist Angela Davis has pointed out, radical simply means "grasping things at the root." A region so often exceptionalized for its brutality and white supremacy is also the seedbed of freedom dreams and radical movement traditions. Read more >

Image: Natalie Nelson.

In a year of isolation, we took solace in stories. And in a year of heartbreak, loss, and conflict, we sought understanding. These are the articles our online readers turned to again and again in 2020. We start at the beginning. Our top two reads open with photographs of their authors cradled in a parent's arms, and ask, What shapes us early on? For Natasha Trethewey, it was an early lesson in metaphor. For Malinda Maynor Lowery, it was an understanding that Native history is American history.

Our next two reads plunge deeper into memory. Lisa A. Lindsay grapples with what it means to be a historian with a brain injury. "If memory tells us something about who we are," she writes, "it also tells us about who we . . . were with. That is, it reveals human community." Folklorist Michelle Lanier picks up this thread in her essay "Rooted," as she looks at the Gullah/Geechee community that has grounded her from childhood.

And from the Documentary Moment Issue, two articles contained prescient advice for navigating 2020: making do with what's at hand. Kate Medley created a temporary portrait studio at gas stations in the Mississippi Delta to photograph daily life. And Kimber Thomas talked to her grandmother's community at the Crossroads, also in the Delta, about how seemingly mundane objects-forks, brown paper sacks, and tobacco tins-became tools for resistance and resilience.

Narratives, too, are tools of resistance. Jessica Lynne imagines the story within a snapshot she keeps close for comfort. "Like my debit card, lip balm, or driver's license," she writes, "this photograph has become part of my daily essentials kit." In an interview, Priscilla Wald pushes against the ways we tend to talk about pandemics, offering alternative stories. And musician Skylar Gudasz calls upon fellow artists to create new realities.

Finally, as poet Nikky Finney stated at the year's start, "The rug has been pulled." There are lessons for all of us in her statement on Black resilience. And we must not emerge from this year the same. Read on >

Sound provides a dynamic lens into the South's layered complexities, offering a provocative framework for engaging the racial, gendered, and socio-historical identities of the region. Southern sounds are musical and nonmusical: the thrum of a subwoofer rattling the trunk of a big body car, stringed harmonies of chirping cicadas and crickets in the heat of a summer night, the laughter of people talking trash at a cookout, the quiet of a felled Confederate monument, the wail of grief at a funeral, or volatile protest at a political rally. Sound is cyclical and multivalent, shaping history and place (and southernness). Read more >

For the next installment of our Shutter photography series, Grace Hale reflects on the work of photographer and musician John Cohen and their decades-long debates. "In our conversations," Hale writes, "Cohen never seems to grasp [my] critique of his work. He understood that some people felt he did not have the right to represent Appalachian or Andean culture as he had done in many of his best-known recordings, photographs, and films. And he had a counter. If he had not made these leaps, some of the music and the beauty of these particular times and places would have been lost to human history. There was no way to test the truth of this counterfactual, and our talks spun around in lively circles. My point ran deeper than an argument about identity politics, and his rebuttal reached far beyond his not inconsiderable ambition for his work. I worried about the cost of representing or trying to speak for others. He worried about the cost of not representing them at all. We never did agree." Read on >

Sound provides a dynamic lens into the South's layered complexities, offering a provocative framework for engaging the racial, gendered, and socio-historical identities of the region. Southern sounds are musical and nonmusical: the thrum of a subwoofer rattling the trunk of a big body car, stringed harmonies of chirping cicadas and crickets in the heat of a summer night, the laughter of people talking trash at a cookout, the quiet of a felled Confederate monument, the wail of grief at a funeral, or volatile protest at a political rally. Sound is cyclical and multivalent, shaping history and place (and southernness). Read more >

Welcome to the next stop on our virtual Book Tour. Since so many literary events have been canceled or postponed during the pandemic, we''re bringing authors directly to you. We hope you''ll get to know a writer or book to add to your reading list. We also encourage you to support your local bookshop.

Michael Croley's collection Any Other Place: Stories (2019) explores alienation and desire in the small town of Fordyce, Kentucky. For this leg of our Book Tour, Belle Boggs, author of The Gulf and The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood, chats with Croley about home, parenthood, and the importance of daydreaming. Read more >

For The Abolitionist South, we seek submissions that make visible a radical US South which has long envisioned a world without policing, prisons, or other forms of punishment. As PIC (prison industrial complex) abolitionist Angela Davis has pointed out, radical simply means "grasping things at the root." A region so often exceptionalized for its brutality and white supremacy is also the seedbed of freedom dreams and radical movement traditions. Read more >

Image: Natalie Nelson.

For The Abolitionist South, we seek submissions that make visible a radical US South which has long envisioned a world without policing, prisons, or other forms of punishment. As PIC (prison industrial complex) abolitionist Angela Davis has pointed out, radical simply means "grasping things at the root." A region so often exceptionalized for its brutality and white supremacy is also the seedbed of freedom dreams and radical movement traditions. Read more >

Image: Natalie Nelson

Related Reading
Randall Kenan in 
A Southern Fiction Roundtable

One of the best explanations I've heard of what the American South is was said by the late Reynolds Price. The South, he said, was an amalgam of the African American presence, a strong agricultural society, and the Protestant religion, and how these elements mixed and expressed themselves. There has always been a black presence in New England; California is one of the world's biggest agricultural powers; Protestantism is a significant presence in the Pacific Northwest. None of them come anywhere near to being like the American South.

I suffer from a great worry, a clich?d worry, that what most people think of when they think of contemporary Southern Literature is a literature stuck in Nostalgia. Paeans to magnolias and moonshine, odes to grandma and porch sits, ghosts of the Civil War and dialects thick as molasses. Of course, everyone everywhere has grandmothers (who loves a grandmother more than the Irish, the Japanese, or the Russians?). Everybody gets drunk (Ditto). And what landscape is free from apparitions of civil strife?

It seems to me that the better millennial southern writers shun nostalgia and false historical romance. They write about the way we live now. They write about: hog factory farms, the growing immigrant community, health care, cell phone reception, free WiFi, and LGBT rights. Yes, they love farm-to-table and are besotted by craft beers, but that's part of their flavor. Nonetheless, they are aware of and informed by the past. They really are the New South and represent our best hope to remain America's most relevant, loud, high-spirited, authentic voice. 
Read the full Southern Fiction Roundtable >

For The Abolitionist South, we seek submissions that make visible a radical US South which has long envisioned a world without policing, prisons, or other forms of punishment. As PIC (prison industrial complex) abolitionist Angela Davis has pointed out, radical simply means "grasping things at the root." A region so often exceptionalized for its brutality and white supremacy is also the seedbed of freedom dreams and radical movement traditions. Read more >

Image: Natalie Nelson

For The Abolitionist South, we seek submissions that make visible a radical US South which has long envisioned a world without policing, prisons, or other forms of punishment. As PIC (prison industrial complex) abolitionist Angela Davis has pointed out, radical simply means "grasping things at the root." A region so often exceptionalized for its brutality and white supremacy is also the seedbed of freedom dreams and radical movement traditions. Read more >

Image: Natalie Nelson

Peeling paint curls up from the walls in the corner of the Perry County Jail where Billie Jean Young stands, her hands hanging through the slim panes of a jalousie window. Prisoners used to hang their hands out like this, she tells me. "From outside, all you could see were hands." 

The jail has long been abandoned, and is showing it. The building has a story to tell, and Dr. Young wants to make sure it is passed on. While Selma is known for the famous marches that began there in 1965, those marches actually began in Marion one night in February, 1965, in the jail cell next to where Young tells me the story. Read more >

For The Abolitionist South, we seek submissions that make visible a radical US South which has long envisioned a world without policing, prisons, or other forms of punishment. As PIC (prison industrial complex) abolitionist Angela Davis has pointed out, radical simply means "grasping things at the root." A region so often exceptionalized for its brutality and white supremacy is also the seedbed of freedom dreams and radical movement traditions. Read more >

Image: Natalie Nelson.

From the archives, we present a feast of rabbit-an essay by Will Sexton on North Carolina''s once-thriving rabbit market, and tunes by the folk duo Chatham Rabbits, who take their name from this history. "Although the same cottontails flourished across the region, Chatham County turned its rabbits into something like a regional brand, recognized throughout the South and along the eastern seaboard," writes Sexton. "By the end of the nineteenth century, Siler City had become the de facto rabbit capital of the Southeast." Read on >

Sound provides a dynamic lens into the South's layered complexities, offering a provocative framework for engaging the racial, gendered, and socio-historical identities of the region. Southern sounds are musical and nonmusical: the thrum of a subwoofer rattling the trunk of a big body car, stringed harmonies of chirping cicadas and crickets in the heat of a summer night, the laughter of people talking trash at a cookout, the quiet of a felled Confederate monument, the wail of grief at a funeral, or volatile protest at a political rally. Sound is cyclical and multivalent, shaping history and place (and southernness). Read more >

"In my childhood belly, I knew at once that my days in blackberry bushes and sitting between Gullah knees to have my hair combed-these things, that island, those trees, that water-were all sacred. I was determined to remember. And I did." Read on >

Image: Floridawater IV, 2019. Archival pigment print, 24 ? 36 in. Courtesy of the artist and the Marianne Boesky Gallery. ? Allison Janae Hamilton.

For The Abolitionist South, we seek submissions that make visible a radical US South which has long envisioned a world without policing, prisons, or other forms of punishment. As PIC (prison industrial complex) abolitionist Angela Davis has pointed out, radical simply means "grasping things at the root." A region so often exceptionalized for its brutality and white supremacy is also the seedbed of freedom dreams and radical movement traditions. Read more >

Image: Natalie Nelson.

"When I first saw Tommy Kha's ''Return to Sender'' series, I couldn't help but think of an article I'd read some years ago about online dating apps in the United States. The article revealed how self-identified Asian men and women occupied opposite ends of a desirability spectrum, with Asian women rated the highest among all cultural backgrounds and Asian men ranked ''least desirable.''

As an Asian woman, I've thought about hyper-sexualized stereotypes my whole life. Every time I go on a date, I'm left wondering if my suitor is actually interested in me or if I'm being fetishized. It never occurred to me what it would feel like to elicit the opposite response." Read more >

It was a hot day in Lake County, Florida, 1971. The orange harvest encompassed the winter months, but most days between November and May, winter meant merely hot and humid, rather than unbearably hot and humid. The orange trees were tall enough-about thirty feet-that they normally cast a long shadow on the dirt road beside them. That day, the shade was punctured by the red and blue lights of the Lake County Sheriff Office's patrol cars. The cars were parked on the side of the road, creating a barricade between six Mexican American volunteers with the United Farm Workers (UFW) and the several dozen Black workers that were harvesting oranges in the Minute Maid groves.

UFW volunteers were there with union election cards, hoping to get a simple majority of workers to sign demanding union representation. The officers were there to arrest them the moment they stepped off the county road and into the groves, onto private property. The volunteers didn't need to move. Workers stepped out from beside the trees, crossed the road, and took the cards to sign up themselves. In the following months, this scene would play out again and again across Central Florida's citrus belt. Read more >

Image: Mack Lyons and Cesar Chavez at a UFW rally, 1971. Courtesy of the Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

In advance of Labor Day, Shorlette Ammons examines our current food supply chain. In her work as Equity and Outreach Coordinator at the Center for Environmental Farming Systems, Ammons endeavors to "elevate the efforts and resilience of those who are working to make [food supply chains] more equitable." She''s come to understand that while "a resilient food system is important . . . we must go beyond a resilient food system to create a sovereign one" if we are to sustain the lessons learned during times of crisis. Read more >

Image: Tall Grass Food Box orders being processed for pick up at NorthStar Church of the Arts, Durham, NC, by Jade Wilson.

Happy Thanksgiving, dear readers. Like many of you, we are missing family and friends, near and far this holiday, and reimagining traditions and the meaning of home. 

For The Abolitionist South, we seek submissions that make visible a radical US South which has long envisioned a world without policing, prisons, or other forms of punishment. As PIC (prison industrial complex) abolitionist Angela Davis has pointed out, radical simply means "grasping things at the root." A region so often exceptionalized for its brutality and white supremacy is also the seedbed of freedom dreams and radical movement traditions. Read more >

Image: Natalie Nelson

Last December, as I was wrapping up a visit to my family in eastern North Carolina (the last such visit I'd be able to make, it turned out, for quite a while), my mom gave me a brown spiral-bound handbook: Presbyterian Pot Pourri, a cookbook published in 1984 by the women of the First Presbyterian Church of Whiteville, North Carolina. Given the season, I was in New Year's resolution mode, unaware that the coming year would not be one conducive in the least to resolution-keeping-unless your resolution was to, say, socialize less. But at the end of 2019 I was resolved to make a church lady pound cake in 2020. Read more >

Sound provides a dynamic lens into the South's layered complexities, offering a provocative framework for engaging the racial, gendered, and socio-historical identities of the region. Southern sounds are musical and nonmusical: the thrum of a subwoofer rattling the trunk of a big body car, stringed harmonies of chirping cicadas and crickets in the heat of a summer night, the laughter of people talking trash at a cookout, the quiet of a felled Confederate monument, the wail of grief at a funeral, or volatile protest at a political rally. Sound is cyclical and multivalent, shaping history and place (and southernness). Read more >

Crystal Simone Smith's haiku is infused with a profound love for and appreciation of the natural world. As one of a growing community of Black haiku poets, Smith's work is also that of an activist, born from her life as a Black woman and mother of two Black sons. Her words resonate as much-needed interventions during a time-like so many other moments in our nation's history-when it is all too harrowing to be Black and human. Her haiku "election night map," written in response to Jaune Quick-to-See Smith's Fifty Shades of White [above], exemplifies the art of distilling the moment. Smith's work is shaped by her commitment to her craft and her refusal to look away. As she notes, "We have an obligation to respond to the immense ongoing inhumanity we are witnessing, ragingly so." A poet whose work is at once haunting and human, Smith's witness, her activism, is necessary reading. Read more >

Sound provides a dynamic lens into the South's layered complexities, offering a provocative framework for engaging the racial, gendered, and socio-historical identities of the region. Southern sounds are musical and nonmusical: the thrum of a subwoofer rattling the trunk of a big body car, stringed harmonies of chirping cicadas and crickets in the heat of a summer night, the laughter of people talking trash at a cookout, the quiet of a felled Confederate monument, the wail of grief at a funeral, or volatile protest at a political rally. Sound is cyclical and multivalent, shaping history and place (and southernness). Read more >

After the fire went out,
we kept burning.
I confused the embers
in your hair for stardust,
but who was I, then,
to know the log was lit
from the inside,
flush with its own grief?
I've buried myself
in the compost heap.

Keep reading >

Image: Julienne Alexander