Featured // Vol. 32, No. 1
Florida Boys
essay by Josh Aronson
Our Past
Browse past issues and articles from the last 30 years
Poetry
Scribbles After the Fourth Funeral This Year
by James Daniels“Everybody I love / is dead or wants to be.”
Essay
Holding Ground
Climate Change, System Collapse, and Home in New Orleans
by Shannon Dosemagen“New Orleans is a weather city. Our relationship to the atmosphere is daily, immediate, visceral.” Home is identity and inheritance, memory and continuity, and a place where intellectual knowledge and emotional allegiance often collide without resolution. In a city like New Orleans, home perhaps takes on a denser meaning because of the interwoven social structures »
Essay
A Mecca for a Million
Lincoln Beach and the Struggle over Black Public Space
by Shruti Gautam“In preserving Lincoln Beach’s memory, New Orleanians also envisioned a future in which Black leisure would have a place to thrive.” In the summer of 2023, I followed behind families toting floaties and foam coolers, trudging up an incline on the side of a levee. As I fumbled over a fence and down a ladder, »
Memoir
That’s No Way to Live Your Life
My Family’s Gay Hairdresser
by Harry Thomas Jr.“Me-at-seventeen badly needed a queer mentor, someone who could open the gate to the gay world and give me a tour, answer my questions.” Hearing the line that will stay in my head for weeks and years and decades to come goes like this: I am fourteen or fifteen or maybe even sixteen. I am »
Memoir
Cousin Jimmy
by Michael McFee“Jimmy Carter was a paradox, my favorite kind of person. He was a human being being human, and owning it.” One drizzly Tuesday night in Chapel Hill—April Fool’s Day, 1975—my girlfriend and I were studying in the student union at the University of North Carolina. We’d found a vacant room then shut the door, spreading out books and »
Essay
How to Fire a Professor at the University of Florida
Two Historical Blueprints
by Ben Wise“The historical pattern is clear: Political interference with the mission of the university has the power to shape the faculty population, influence campus culture, and ruin individual lives.” The university classroom is a recurring setting in the theatre of the American reactionary imagination. For those possessed of nightmarish and creative minds, the classroom is a »
Essay
Collecting Ourselves
Archives, Family History, and Black Southern Migration to Chicago
by Sumayya Ahmed“By searching for the archival traces of my family’s pre- and early migration life, I become my family’s historian, putting primary sources in conversation with family lore and oral histories.” In summer of 2020, the Alabama State Archives issued a statement acknowledging its role in upholding systematic racism by, among other things, putting into practice »
Front Porch
In Spirit, in Blood, and in Truth
by Regina N. BradleyI always talk about the paternal side of my family—Nana Boo, Paw Paw, Daddy ’nem—but rarely share about my maternal southern roots. Mommy’s side of the family is a mystery wrapped up in a legend that eggs on my curiosity ’bout where my Mommy’s people ’nem from. On her side, I got different types of »
Mindful of That Last Hour of Light
by Sheila MadaryWe understand history in hindsight. Or, as the German philosopher Hegel writes, “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” Twenty years have passed since Hurricane Katrina destroyed all of our family’s belongings as it devastated New Orleans neighborhoods and the Gulf Coast. When I think of Katrina, the »
Art
Here We Come Again
by Southern CulturesFrom autographs to photographs, and from behind the scenes to front of stage, we offer a view of country music fandom as found in the Grand Ole Opry archives. Curated by Tim Davis, archives manager at the Opry Entertainment Group, “Here We Come Again” is on view now at the Center for the Study of »
Music
Y’all Belong
by Marcie Cohen FerrisJuly 20, 1969. I was twelve years old and at Jewish summer camp in Missouri, where we gathered in a giant circle in a field and sang “Aquarius” as Apollo 11, carrying three American astronauts, landed on the moon. The Woodstock “Music and Art Fair” happened a month later. That June, the Stonewall Riots took »
Memoir
I Saw Sissy
by Sharony Green“And some of us so country and so baaaad / like the daddy on Good Times when he gets up to / find a Western on TV and he pretends to be / John Wayne while he doing it” I saw Sissy in Urban CowboyA woman riding on a mechanical bullcould make men wake up »
