I lied. My grandmother asked if I wanted to take their portrait, and I said yes. It’s not that I didn’t like my grandparents; it’s that I don’t take portraits of strangers. Standing at the front door, I realized it was the first time I had returned to their home in Missouri in thirty years. »
The only time I remember reading about my hometown of Vicksburg, Mississippi, in my K–12 education was during my senior year Advanced Placement English class. We read The Unvanquished by William Faulkner. In the opening scene, Loosh, a man enslaved by the Sartoris family, destroys a map of Vicksburg that the Sartoris child, Bayard, had made, using »
Photo Essay
Born and raised in the American South by a white Northern family, I have felt my experiences and identity straddle a line between the two, even while identifying with both. Growing up, my father took the initiative to teach and cultivate a deep appreciation of history and culture, taking the family to the many historical »
As we look toward the New Year, here’s a look back at some pieces we’ve loved this year—our baker’s dozen. We might need a new story. We’re staying strong. We’re looking for something beautiful out of the darkness. And looking for lessons in a fig library. We’re putting on a pop, err, country song. We’re »
Art
On the cover and throughout the issue, we’re pleased to present selections from Kevin Brisco Jr.’s series It’s My House and I Lived Here, which premiered at albertz benda gallery in Los Angeles, October 4–November 23, 2024. THE HOME EPITOMIZES our most basic ideas of security and comfort. It is a container for life’s most intimate moments »
Poetry
I learned to ride out of necessityas if it were the town that bore me:bareback at the brim of the riverbanking Sunday’s best, abandonedbriefs on bushes »
Back Porch
“Central to constructs of home and region is memory. Southern memories . . . are the backbone of the region’s identity.” I’M A MILITARY BRAT. Both parents in the Navy, to be exact. I’ve lived a little bit of here and a little bit of there: I was born in Hawaii, then moved to Beaufort, »
Photo Essay
“What does a liberated life mean for queer southerners and for the folks around us? When will home accept us?” AS A CHILD IN BIRMINGHAM, I saw girls visit my masculine-presenting neighbor at night. They talked through the screen at her bedroom window. I wondered why I’d never see them enter the house, and it »
Memoir
“For me, Miguel, you were always a part of the‘we’that I think of when I think of home.” THIS IS THE LAND that brought us together. I have been driving for seven hours. I am tired. I stop my car in the shoulder on the Highway 82 Mississippi River Bridge to watch the sun set »
Photo Essay
“The older I got, the more I realized that our acceptance was . . . fragile, conditional. The signs were small but telling.” FRUSTRATION WITH MY COUNTRY came first. One evening in the early 1970s, my mom and dad debated whether to allow me and my sister to watch a tv news special about the 1963 »
Interview
“Home may include the earth, may include the space around it, but it is far more expansive thanthat.” ON JULY 4, TWO LONGTIME FRIENDS and former colleagues in the department of English at Duke University sat down to dialogue about visions of home in African American cultural life and imagination. Prompted by guest editors Blair LM »
Music
“A more expansive understanding of the journey home invites an imagination of a Black worldwhere Blackness exists in both quotidian and spectacular ways.” IN AN ABANDONED GARAGE in downtown Houston, Solange Knowles steps in front of a vintage Cadillac with her arms outstretched, dressed in a diamond-encrusted fringe bikini, white cowboy boots, and a perfectly laid »