Writing for the Southern Cultures Audience
When writing for Southern Cultures, please keep in mind our readers include scholars from many academic disciplines but that the interested general public makes up approximately 75% of our audience. Consequently, we are especially interested in reader-friendly articles that deal with southern topics in the broadest possible way and that open up a larger discussion on the South. For this reason we strongly recommend that you read Southern Cultures before you submit your work.
Southern Cultures publishes several types of material. Our full-length essays and articles generally run 15–20 double-spaced manuscript pages (3,750–5,000 words). Under this format, your introduction should offer our non-specialist, non-scholarly readers a context for your topic, but should not survey the relevant historiography in detail. References and concepts familiar to your discipline likely will need a brief explanation at first mention. (Many issues that are often left implicit in full-length articles in strictly academic journals receive a more direct and accessible treatment in Southern Cultures.) Please keep technical jargon to a minimum, as well as endnotes, which we typically try to cap at twenty.
Photo essays also are integral part of our content. We ask that photo essay submissions include 10–25 high-resolution (at least 1.5 MB) black and white images on CD or USB key, along with a short introduction of 200–300 words. (We will also accept submissions of film prints but cannot at this time work directly from negatives.) We select images and copyedit all introductions to accepted photo essays, but please do note your personal preferences among those photographs you have submitted.
Over the last several years Southern Cultures also has published many full-length interviews with significant, interesting, and often famous Southerners. Please do not submit an interview, however, without first discussing it with the Executive Editor.
We also publish shorter features: Upbeat Down South (music), Not Forgotten (personal reminiscences), Beyond Grits and Gravy (food), South Polls (surveys on contemporary trends), Southern Voices (short interviews), and Mason-Dixon Lines (poetry). We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts for South Polls or Mason-Dixon Lines. You may submit writing for the other features, though, which typically run 8–14 pages (2,000–3,500 words).
Lastly, Southern Cultures publishes book reviews of 3–4 pages (750–1,000 words). We do not accept unsolicited book reviews, however. If you would like to review a book for us, please first contact the Deputy Editor.