Photo Essay
“To be southern like the South’s time, part ghost, part momentum.” TO BE AN IMAGE that regards the historic South’s impression. To be an index, a document, a testament, a moment, a facsimile, a reference, a distillation, a memory … of that physical and nonphysical region. To feel of the South, and southern, like an accent can. To »
“There was nothing my grandmother wanted . . . she had everything she needed—a beautiful home, a loving and devoted family, a new grandchild.” THIS IS WHAT MY MOTHER has told me: on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 16, 1973, my grandmother, Thelma Vivian Gordon, died of a massive coronary episode while tending to the garden »
Essay
When I sat down to think about the opportunity to guest edit an issue of Southern Cultures, I thought immediately about the idea of home. I am the new director of the UNC Center for the Study of the American South, the physical and intellectual home of Southern Cultures, the Southern Oral History Program, and Southern Futures. »
Photo Essay
As quickly as I found myself in the family way, I just as quickly found myself giving birth. A strange birth following a car pile-up. Blood in the crotch of my underwear. Seven layers of skin peeled back and sewn together again in under thirty minutes. Suddenly, a two-pound baby was born, looking anything but »
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 »