Art
In a moment when we’re encouraged to stay home and shelter-in-place, we’ve asked many of our illustrator friends to document what home now means to them. Print them out, color them in, and create your own to share with us online using the hashtag #SCatHome. You can also download a full printable PDF at the »
Food
We asked some of our friends and former contributors what they’ve been cooking from the cupboard during this time of self-isolation and limited grocery runs. Below, find three recipes that rely on pantry staples and that call on the comforts of home and family traditions. Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwiches By Bill Smith This lockdown »
Food
We asked some of our friends and former contributors what they’ve been cooking from the cupboard during this time of self-isolation and limited grocery runs. Below, find three recipes that rely on pantry staples and that call on the comforts of home and family traditions. Biscuit Church by April McGreger Sundays have always been a »
Poetry
If in the crinkling thin as air metallicblankets there are flashes signaling backand forth over the little bodies wrappedinside them sleeping on cage floor, gym floor, floor of a defunct warehouse, don’t think of torchfires, beacons of distress, or in the softnessany sign of soothing though they’re softas tissue, even softer yet untearable, a just »
Snapshot
“As blood filled the syringe and tears began to fall down her cheeks, Willow’s mood shifted from excitement to determination, frustration to embarrassment.” Between 2015 and 2017, I partnered with University of Alabama at Birmingham sociology professor Heith Copes to create an ethnography of methamphetamine use in rural Northeast Alabama. Together, we interviewed and photographed »
Snapshot
“It’s another muggy southern summer and the landscape is overgrown with signs and symbols following in its oxygen. How much hill can a person bear?” The thing about moments for me is that they’re never about one thing. Frustratingly, photography carries a singular moment in time but must bear the weight, too—of context, truth, and »
Film
“I have skin in the game. I live here. Appalachians hold me accountable at the grocery store, and that makes the work, and me, more honest.” The week of March 13, 2017, was like any other week for me. I was hustling to get access to a tense courtroom for my feature documentary Recovery Boys »
Snapshot
“What I appreciate most in this document are my grandmother’s inked corrections of the misspelled name of the family who enslaved ours.” My grandmother was a secret archivist. When we cleaned out her home after she died, we found neatly organized records of her life. Among stacks of newspaper articles of nearly every milestone in »
Photo Essay
“We were not so much learning how to photograph as how to see.” I often describe my undergraduate photography training at Yale University as a photo boot camp. On the first day of class, we were told to acquire a 35 mm camera—ideally one that did not require a battery—with a 50 mm lens. Zoom »
Snapshot
“From where I stood, I saw the spirit their bodies had conjured: that was the moment I wanted.” We were in a crowded church. I couldn’t see much until I let the crying, stomping, and chanting guide me. As the believers rocked side to side, their skirts and robes blended with the powerful sounds filling »
Snapshot
“And just as I was starting to get frustrated that a picture wasn’t to be found here, I spotted Emanuel and his son Yeddeh in the shaded opening of their garage, engaged in a most intimate and trusting family ritual.” This little neighborhood in Baytown, Texas, sandwiched between I-10 and the Lynch-burg Canal on the »
Essay
“These women were engaged in an ongoing, material experiment of how to be together and live together in their world, at the Crossroads.” Mamie Barnes was the first Black woman to own land at the Crossroads. Her lot was right below the four-way stop, down the fork and to the left, directly in the sun, »