For generations, Black Charlestonians have endured unspeakable injustice, yet found within themselves the power to forgive—a radical act that defies history and asserts dignity in the face of hate. This excerpt from Mother Emanuel captures their grace.
When we were kids, understanding the afterlife was confusing and frightening. A Southern writer gets inside the head of a boy who’s scared plumb to death.
What we want to believe about our ancestors and what we believed as children pose questions that may never have answers.
A North Carolina poet fills her verses with memories and observations that flow from the present day back into the years passed and gone.
In West Virginia, the state with the nation’s highest rate of death by overdose, faith communities answer urgent callings from any and all.
A Kentucky poet explores who we are, the places we inhabit and the skies that shimmer above us.
He restored an old mountain cabin, wrote a sonnet to an old man and fell asleep, missing the sounds of the whippoorwill.
She moved from the mountains of Germany’s Black Forest to the mountains of Tennessee. Her welcome there felt like divine intervention.
No mother tongue is as rich as the Southern one. Our words are musical, and poetry expresses them with soul-shaking force. Annie Woodford celebrates the songs we say.
When the bulldozers topple the trees and the owls and the field mice and the feral cats are gone, who will remember?
Three verses that take us from the gorges of western North Carolina to that mess on the front porch.
Salvation South kicks off a month-long celebration of Southern poetry with a soaring essay from Annie Woodford.
Daniel Wallace’s brother-in-law was his hero. But in the journals he left behind, Wallace discovered the darkness that claimed his idol’s life.
