How to Write a Ballad
Two lifelong friends—one a poet, one a painter–talk about it all: labor, joy, and love; the value of slowness; the subtleties of structure; and how to “make it soft, make it low.”
Stories
I Heard Them All Speak
Alabama Poet Laureate Ashley M. Jones creates entire worlds in three new poems and affirms the power of poetry to help us see others and ourselves.
By Ashley M. Jones /
Just the Right Amount of Sunflowers
Three dazzling new poems by Mississippian C.T. Salazar, and an interview on binaries, ecologies, and the mysteries of time.
By C.T. Salazar /
What It’s Like to Live Here
Veteran South Carolina poet Ray McManus, the winner of the 2023 Governor’s Award for the Arts, writes beautifully about rural life—from boar hogs to pickup trucks to the hunger that won’t go away.
By Ray McManus /
Taylor Swift Didn’t Talk to Our Southern Poets
Tay Tay says poets are “tortured.” Jacqueline Allen Trimble turns that assumption inside out.
By Chuck Reece /
Revise Your Eyes
Junious “Jay” Ward, Charlotte’s inaugural Poet Laureate, serves up three new poems and talks about how his new post lets him “take the church to the people.”
By Junious “Jay” Ward /
The Secret Signal to Wake
Cumberland Gap poet Denton Loving talks about changes in Appalachian culture and offers four new poems that apply the wisdom of nature to the human predicament.
By Denton Loving /
Guiding Us Home
From Washington, D.C., three poems honoring ancestry and excavating history.
By Melanie Henderson /
A Monster Truck Passes the Poetry Reading
Let’s not get so cultured we’re blind, folks.
By John Davis Jr. /
The Space Dividing Us Must Be Destroyed
Four new poems by—and an in-depth conversation with—Kentucky’s Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.
By Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr. /
Like a Poke in the Eye
How well chosen words can fight for folks who need defending.
By Chuck Reece /
Open at Last
Visionary in all weathers, Louisville’s Emma Aprile finds a way to carry hope through life’s balancing act.
By Emma Aprile /
A Bouffant Stacked Toward Heaven
Four new poems by—and an interview with— Marianne Worthington, author of “The Girl Singer”