Featured // vol. 31, no. 2
Hip-Hop Playlist
essay by Corey J. Miles
Our Past
Browse past issues and articles from the last 30 years
Hip-Hop Playlist
by Corey J. MilesGuest editing a special issue on the Hip-Hop South required falling in love with the sound of my home in a new way. When Regina Bradley asked me to come on to the project, I know now that when I said “yes” I didn’t fully understand how long you must sit still to pull together a »
Essay
Dear Sisters
Wanda and Brenda Henson and the Legacy of Camp Sister Spirit
by Julie R. EnszerIn July 1993, Wanda and Brenda Henson bought a “defunct pig and grape farm” in Ovett, Mississippi. Brenda described the land as “right outside Hattiesburg, 77 miles from the Gulf Coast,” where they’d been living in Gulfport. Located on Bogue Homa Creek, the 120-acre property had “five barns and one house to be renovated” and »
Interview
Country Queers
The Road Trip
by Rae GarringerThe following is an excerpt from Country Queers: A Love Letter (Haymarket Books, 2024) and has been lightly edited to appear on Southern Cultures in collaboration with the Queer South issue. Early in the spring of 2014, I borrowed a neighbor’s video camera and recorded myself, with my ducks hanging out in the background, rambling »
Essay
State Visions
North Carolina Regional Planning in Richard Saul Wurman’s The Piedmont Crescent (1968)
by Martin JohnsonBy almost any account, North Carolina has undergone dramatic changes in the past half-century. What was once a slow-growing, largely rural state is now a fast-growing, increasingly urban one. While the state used to be known for textiles and tobacco, it is now a center for banking, technology, and medicine. This transformation was not accidental. »
Memoir
White Trash Roots
by Linda R. MonkI come from a long line of people whose lives seemed straight out of a Walker Evans photograph. Landless whites, rootless, disposable—“white trash.” It’s hard to create home from contingency, or a feeling of belonging from worthlessness. They say southerners are people defined by place, but I never believed it. At least it wasn’t true »
Dedication
Dorothy Allison and Minnie Bruce Pratt
by Hooper Schultz, Jaime HarkerWith deepest gratitude, we dedicate this issue of Southern Cultures to Dorothy Allison (April 11, 1949–November 6, 2024) and Minnie Bruce Pratt (September 12, 1946–July 2, 2023), two paragons of the queer South. Lesbian artist-activists, Allison and Pratt showed us the power of queers in the region. They questioned power structures, racism, and patriarchy, and fought for »
Art
Beneath the Steely Façade
by RF. AlvarezOn the cover and throughout the issue, we’re pleased to present artwork by Austin-based artist RF. Alvarez (b. 1998, San Antonio, Texas). His figurative paintings are characterized by nocturnal color pallets and evocative scenes that blend personal memory with romantic allegory. Using a process of dry-brushing paint onto raw linen—and borrowing stylistic techniques from Old »
Essay
This Is Just the Beginning
Mapping Queer Southern Scholarship
by Hooper Schultz, Jaime HarkerIn 2017, I was knee-deep in queer southern literature. Unbeknownst to my colleagues and students at the University of Mississippi, I was building a stock list for Violet Valley Bookstore, Mississippi’s only queer feminist bookshop, which I planned to open in November of that year. I was teaching a syllabus I’d developed for a graduate »
Poetry
Something Trans-Happened to My Body When I Crossed the Atlantic
by Honora AnkongI seeped out of a middle-passage wound, a continental Africandescendent of the un-took. Immigrant,in search of lost lineage. I dove into the AtlanticIts unending Blackness—turbulent & queer.
Poetry
Reaching out and reaching out
by Gaby Calvocoressi, Destiny Hemphill“That’s some part of Queerness, isn’t it? Reaching out and reaching out and wondering about and learning from each other.” Yesterday, Sunday, February 7, I was working at a coworking spot here in Durham. My wonderful friends and colleagues at my teaching job got me a subscription to this place for my fiftieth because my »
Essay
God Loves Women, and I Do Too
The Spiritual Communities of Southern Black Queer Women and Nonbinary Folks
by Montia Daniels“Having spaces where Black queer people feel affirmed and safe is essential, and some participants decided to leave their church when they didn’t feel safe and affirmed in them.” My story of queer becoming was a communal affair. After the fallout from coming out, the tears, and the imagined casting out of my queerness, there »
Memoir
Sister, Outsider, or Reflections on My Mother
by Joanmarie BañezDuring my first Thanksgiving away from home since I had moved to San Diego for graduate school, my mother, Lita, called me after she and my stepdad, Mike, returned home from the family Thanksgiving dinner. The dinner was hosted by Annie and Steve, my pseudoparents, and it turned out that year, 2019, was one of »
