Interview
“Home may include the earth, may include the space around it, but it is far more expansive thanthat.” ON JULY 4, TWO LONGTIME FRIENDS and former colleagues in the department of English at Duke University sat down to dialogue about visions of home in African American cultural life and imagination. Prompted by guest editors Blair LM »
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
Consider the evolution of cultural forms and our present role—whether active or passive—in shaping the folklore of the future. Folklorist Henry Glassie elaborates on his conception of tradition as “the creation of the future out of the past,” as, “A continuous process situated in the nothingness of the present, linking the vanished with the unknown, »
Interview
A few years ago, my mother suggested we go see an exhibition of cloth paintings at the Rosalind Sallenger Richardson Center for the Arts at Wofford College, the small liberal arts college in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where my late father had worked from the early 1980s to 2007. The exhibition was entitled Scraps from My »
Interview
In the mid-1970s, Sorrell Hays, a composer of electronic music, took her synthesizers, sound equipment, and contact mics to Dougherty County, Georgia. She was there to introduce children in newly desegregated classrooms to experimental forms of music-making. For Hays (1941–2020), it was a return to the South after almost two decades away and a confrontation »
Interview
We are all makers, constantly using tangible and intangible tools to craft our reality. There is an intentionality around the life that Allan Jones has crafted for himself. The photographer, design enthusiast, and recreational beekeeper has an intimate relationship to his environment and activates the power of creativity to advance matters of justice. His work »
Interview
Drive through any town, anywhere, and among the essential food stores and gas stations there are repair shops. “There will always be a need for somebody to repair broken stuff,” said ceramics restorer Lenore Guston. “Because we’re humans, we’re breaking stuff all the time.” Over the last year and a half, with the support of »
Essay
In January of 2019, I began a “listening tour” across North Carolina as editor of Edible North Carolina, work that started in my food studies teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The vision for this book was to create a portrait of North Carolina’s vibrant contemporary food landscape. I chose twenty »
Interview
“I don’t think this is political, I think this is fact—we need to highlight that the struggle isn’t over.” From spring 2019 to spring 2020, the Southern Oral History Program undergraduate internship focused its study on the history of women’s suffrage in the United States. In anticipation of the Nineteenth Amendment’s centennial, interns interviewed members »
Essay
“Womanhood—how people experience being women—is an expansive historical category that includes more than just women.” Greta lingered just outside the downward-slanting entrance of the old warehouse on the edge of downtown Roanoke. A few decades earlier, this building was home to a restaurant equipment supply company, but by 1976 deindustrialization and suburbanization had taken hold »
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 »
Interview
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 »