Photo Essay
שיר אינסופי / Infinite Poem is an exploration of Jewish placemaking, both literal and metaphorical, in the Deep South. This work seeks to understand how Jewish communities in rural areas and small towns across Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia have preserved their traditions while forging a unique identity in places that are often perceived »
Music
Since the news of Dolly Parton’s passing on Tuesday, the world’s rhinestones are all shining a little less brightly. Reading the obituaries in the hours since her passing, it is hard not to notice how similar they are. This is, in part, a testament to how meticulously Dolly honed a persona of positivity over a »
Poetry
These poems are taken from The Saltwater Letters, my forthcoming volume chiefly made up of poem-letters to friends, family, and fellow writers. This book-to-be began a number of years ago with a letter to the late Lucille Clifton, then several others coming in quick succession. Then, as I indicate in “Lost Letter to Yusef Komunyakaa,” »
Art
Writing about myself, what I do on a certain day, who I meet, ideas I might have, my views on current events or the cultural moment in which we find ourselves; or notes on books I’m reading, frustrations I may or may not have with my career, hopes, dreams, regrets, plans; even the world of »
Essay
“Murray’s journey of racial and gender self-definition through mobility, travel, and transmasculine jouissance was intrinsic to their creativity and self-expression.” Pauli Murray (1910–1985) was an African American gender-nonconforming feminist, civil rights activist, legal scholar, and teacher, and, later in life, an Episcopalian priest. Raised largely in Durham, North Carolina, by their maternal aunts, Murray was »
Interview
“Art is an artifact, you know? Once you assume that every single language in literature is a created language, is an artificial language, you feel free to just include whatever is there around you.” Translation is a double form of correspondence between me and Lisa. First, there is the near-daily—or, sometimes, multiple-times-a-day—correspondence we’ve maintained during »
Art
“I never feel so smart as I do when I’m drawing, because I have complete control and I can subvert all else that I’ve just made possible.” A “sketch diary” drawing pad Allan Gurganus bought at the Stanford University Art Center, while on a Stegner Fellowship, displays the name “The Globetrotter” and is personally marked »
Essay
“‘Darling, when I share my loneliness with you I cut it in half.’” If she is known for nothing else, Carson McCullers is known for being southern. The Georgia-born New York transplant set her fiction almost exclusively in small, stagnant towns in the Deep South. Despite her personal ambivalence toward the region, she needed to »
Interview
“Moving through the world as a writer is, I think, an experience of moving through the world with your eyes open to observe. Charlie Lovett: The Correspondent is your debut novel, [but] it was not your first attempt at writing a novel. Can you tell us just a little bit about the road that your »
Photo Essay
“The Welty House speaks to the author’s love of travel, art, music, and the centrality of family to her life. But it is, above all, a home designed for work, which, in Welty’s case, meant reading and writing.” Twenty-five years after the author’s death, Eudora Welty’s home phone number remains the same as it ever »
Essay
“Often what is hidden in Mitchell’s portraits of New York is a reflection of his life in North Carolina.” One November day some years ago, at the midpoint of my obsession with legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, I drove two hours south from Durham, North Carolina, where I was living at the time, to »
Fiction
“That’s always been part of the mission of my work—to write about the sheer breadth and wonder and scope of our southern lives.” Leoneda Inge: I understand that this book came at a critical time for you, health-wise. Was writing this novel a healing experience for you? Tayari Jones: I feel like this novel really »