A select few Southern writers create fiction and poetry with equally exquisite skill. This week, the award-winning Kentucky poet Willie Carver publishes his first fiction with us, giving us our first peek at a forthcoming “novel in stories and poems.”

Harriet Tubman first escaped enslavement in Dorchester County, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, on September 17, 1849. She returned at least 13 times to lead at least 70 to freedom. One-hundred-and-seventy-five years after that first escape, these four poems from southeast Virginia honor her spirit of resistance and solidarity.

In southeastern Georgia, a mother stews up some chicken and considers what her family farm requires of her—not what she requires of it.