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A South in Every North

Diego Camposeco’s Utopian Vision

by Diego Camposeco, Jeff Whetstone

Diego Camposeco’s Utopian Vision “The quinceañera is smiling, framed in the center, a standard sort of portrait for the occasion, but she is pointedly out-of-context.” “There is a South in every North,”I wrote Diego Camposeco, whose brilliant career as an artist and filmmaker was cut short by his death in 2019. His art and writing »

Photo Essay

Road Through Midnight

by Jessica Ingram

“In a purposeful inversion of the news headlines from the time, my work foregrounds individuals who fought for civil rights and who were victims of retaliatory violence.” It was a sweltering summer in 2002 and I was wandering downtown Montgomery, exploring and making photographs, when I found myself at a historical marker in front of »

Essay

Rooted

Black Women, Southern Memory, and Womanist Cartographies

by Michelle Lanier, Allison Janae Hamilton

The clay knows the hand.The land knows the feet.The souls know the land. Salt water flows in my veins, and I can recall my first taste of the Atlantic Ocean at two years old. I grew up hearing stories of how a six-year-old boy and girl, my maternal grandparents, met on a sandy South Carolina »

Essay

Seeing in the Dark

by Teka Selman

Don’t you wonder sometimes’Bout sound and vision? Blue, blue, electric blueThat’s the color of my roomWhere I will liveBlue, blue Pale blinds drawn all dayNothing to do, nothing to sayBlue, blue I will sit right down, waiting for the gift of sound and visionAnd I will sing, waiting for the gift of sound and visionDrifting »

Essay

Front Porch: Art & Vision

by Marcie Cohen Ferris

“My family reaches out of these photographs, pushing through time to remind me of the challenges they faced—of flood, pandemic, racial violence, and debt—the same challenges we face today.” In this moment, when connection remains paramount as our lives have shifted to isolation and virtual interaction, I picture an imaginary gathering of the captivating southern »

Music

Comforter

by Skylar Gudasz

“In the business of surviving, it is easy to forget that almost half of our lives is spent dreaming.” The pandemic came to stay for awhile and settled us down, grounded like teenagers in some enduring season beyond the usual markers of weather and time. Southern Cultures, at the beginning of the stay-at-home orders, invited some »

Photo Essay

New Faces of Tradition

by Zoe van Buren, Katy Clune

“The following portraits show a few of the new faces of tradition in North Carolina, revealing the range of who they are, what they do, and how they commit to their artistic practice.” Since 1977, the Folklife Program of the North Carolina Arts Council has identified and documented traditional artists and their communities in order »

Food

Book Tour: A Good Meal Is Hard to Find

by Amy C. Evans, Martha Foose Hall

Welcome to our virtual book tour. Since so many literary events have been canceled or postponed during the pandemic, we’re bringing authors with new books directly to you. We hope you’ll get to know an author or book to add to your reading list. We also encourage you to support your local bookshop. A Good »

Memoir

Memory Fieldwork

How a Historian Grappled with Brain Injury

by Lisa A. Lindsay

“’Lisa, Keep on being a rock star!’ my friend Emily wrote. ‘You’ve proven to the universe that you are not to be messed with. Now you can do anything you want.’ Anything—except, apparently, remember.” The earliest thing I remember after the hemorrhage is a moment that I can’t place in time and that may not »

Interview

COVID-19 and the Outbreak Narrative

by Priscilla Wald, Kym Weed

The more each of us can imagine what it would feel like to live in others’ lives, the better, I think. And the more inclusively we can all think, the more we can collectively begin to work for a world that is more just, more equitable, and in every sense healthier for all. If this »

Poetry

Cellar Door

by Southern Cultures

We’ve published poetry in our pages since nearly the beginning. So when our friends at the CELLAR DOOR—UNC‘s oldest undergraduate literary magazine—said their Spring 2020 Issue would be delayed due to the pandemic, we threw open our own doors and asked them to join us. We’re proud to present the work of seven Carolina undergraduates »

Fiction

Book Tour: The Prettiest Star

by Carter Sickels, Wiley Cash

Welcome to our virtual book tour. Since so many literary events have been canceled or postponed during the pandemic, we’re bringing authors with new books directly to you. We hope you’ll get to know an author or book to add to your reading list. We also encourage you to support your local bookshop. Set in »