Essay
“As we witness their labor and listen to the rising voices of women, we see resolute strength, vigilance, outrage, art, and agency.” On the occasion of this special issue focused on women—thanks to our whip-smart guest editor, historian Jessica Wilkerson—I am grateful for the virtual women’s community I access online in these continued months of »
Interview
Welcome to 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 »
Photo Essay
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 »
Essay
Route 1, Box 80. There, in Eastern North Carolina, a three-bedroom home provided shelter and solace for about two dozen members of my Ammons family at one time or another. The Bests were up the road to the left, and the Roses to the right, just before the “dangerous curve” that left many folks in »
Poetry
I wanted to ask the trees. do you remember. were you there. did you shudder. did your skin cry out against the skin of my great uncle’s skin. was the smell of bark a different smell from the smell of meat flesh. human meat flesh. beloved father husband lover friend man flesh. could the air »
Memoir
I. I have carried a photograph on my person for the past year now. Like my debit card, lip balm, or driver’s license, this photograph has become part of my daily essentials kit. In the black-and-white image, two women clad in patterned and madras print dresses and low kitten heels sit on a rock and »
Interview
Amy Sherald and Deborah Roberts are friends, fellow southerners, and tremendously talented artists. Each in her own way makes work that is meaningful without being didactic and encourages thoughtful, critical consideration. What better people to talk with about the bounds of representation and the possibilities of portraiture? In January 2020, they caught up by phone »
Art
“A drawing is sometimes confirmation to me that the shenanigans needed for a complex work are justified, a visual consideration of a much bigger action.” This selection of drawings and sketches represents thoughts, visions, and various objects and observations, conveying my diverse spectrum of engagements over a few decades. Consider some of them “best laid »
Essay
“That these ancient mounds have stood firm despite millennia of extreme weather, erosion, and, occasionally, looters’ dynamite is a testament to the builders’ skill.” With the snap of the last stick came the end of the broken days and the beginning of Green Corn, a ceremony connecting Muscogee Creeks to their ancestors and purifying them »
Art
“We ride the waves of supply and demand on the banks of the Mississippi, furs and cypress, cotton and cane, oil and gas, corn and grain, coal and aluminum, commodities bought and sold, always en route, pushed up and down river.” They call it “Cancer Alley” because it’s got a reputation. The hundred-mile stretch between »
Art
“By gilding her passport, Page renders its emblematic privileges into an explicit ‘golden ticket.’” Artist Susan Harbage Page uses her US passport (collaged here) to explore her relationship to citizenship, mobility, and access. This self-reflexive art piece figures gold leaf as a signifier of treasured possession and links notions of worth and wealth with inclusion in »
Art
“What does it mean to be (categorically) ‘undesirable’?” 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, »