Interview
The air inside my red and white cooler was still warm from the car and the sun when I opened it on the kitchen counter. I stuck my face inside and inhaled fresh-picked figs from Virginia’s Eastern Shore. They smelled grassy and sweet, of caramel with just a touch of sour. The fruit—grape-sized to large »
Essay
In 1986, singer Dobie Gray released From Where I Stand, an album identified as “country soul.” Because Gray, a Black man, had principally been marketed in pop and R&B, reviewers felt the need to address skepticism he might face about an entry into country music. “When they transition with Gray’s grace, then such moves should be »
Music
Each fall, the Country Music Association presents an awards show that it pioneered in 1967, a once-a-year opportunity to celebrate musicians and industry personnel with titles such as Entertainer of the Year and Song of the Year. Celebrating one winner in each category, these awards suggest to audiences that they summarize the state of country »
Music
Almost exactly two years ago, on October 31, 2022, one month after suffering a stroke on a flight home from Oakland, where he had been performing, Patrick Ambrose Haggerty, the visionary seventy-eight-year-old songwriter, singer, and embodiment of the band Lavender Country, died at his home in Bremerton, Washington. Beside him on both passages was Julius »
Essay
Dearly Beloveds, I am writing to you across a day I cannot predict. But maybe that is always true. You will receive this on a day shaped by the countless (and possibly still being counted) decisions that came before it. And that has also been true every day before this one. I am writing to you »
Art
Kevin Brisco Jr. is the cover artist for the forthcoming Home issue (Fall 2024). Brisco’s exhibition It’s My House and I Lived Here is on view at albertz benda Los Angeles, October 4–November 22, 2024. The home, your home, our home, their home, the space which allows many of us to be our true selves »
Photo Essay
Election Day is in the bag. Or dress. Or hat. As final votes are cast and tallied for the 2024 presidential election, photojournalist Kate Medley provides a dispatch from her work across the state of North Carolina covering the long election season, and gives us a glimpse of what’s in fashion across party lines. election »
Essay
Many places are said to be haunted, houses, inns, forts, hospitals, asylums, and graveyards—definitely graveyards. Any place where tragedy strikes or any place where a terrible injustice has been perpetrated has the potential to become haunted. But how can an entire region like the North Carolina Coast come to be known as haunted? Well, that’s »
Essay
On a late autumn evening in 2005, I drove an hour out of Atlanta to Holly Springs Primitive Baptist Church near Bremen, just a few miles east of the Georgia-Alabama border. The building sits only a few hundred feet from I-20, but the route to the church—about a half-mile past a gas station and through »
Politics
North Carolina’s rural and low-income voters are expected to have a significant impact on this year’s presidential election, directly challenging the misconception that individuals in rural and low-income areas lack interest in politics or have minimal impact on electoral results. Their increased involvement reflects the efforts of local civic engagement organizations, which actively work with »
Politics
The following conversation took place on April 5, 2024, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as part of the thirtieth anniversary celebrations for the Center for the Study of the American South and Southern Cultures, and the launch of the journal’s special issue, The Vote, guest edited by Errin Haines. This conversation »
Photo Essay
It’s hard to believe it has been ten days since the storm. During that time, I’ve driven almost one thousand miles getting into communities that were devastated by Hurricane Helene and running supplies to folks. I traveled to Marion, Swannanoa, Hendersonville, Brevard, Rosman, Ashe County, Chimney Rock, and Bat Cave. In the first few days, »