Skip to content
Featured // Web Only

Get-Up to Vote

essay by Kate Medley
Editor's Picks
Guest edited by:
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Michelle Lanier, Johnica Rivers
SC101

A selection of what our readers love, in all the forms we publish: scholarly articles, memoir, interviews/oral histories, creative nonfiction, photo essays, and shorter features.

A Look at
Our Past

Browse past issues and articles from the last 30 years
Recent Features
beep Photo Essay

Get-Up to Vote

by Kate Medley
Election Day is in the bag. Or dress. Or hat. As final votes are cast and tallied for the 2024 presidential election, photojournalist Kate Medley provides a dispatch from her work across the state of North Carolina covering the long election season, and gives us a glimpse of what’s in fashion across party lines. election »
beep Essay

Why Is the North Carolina Coast So Haunted?

by Thomas Smith
Many places are said to be haunted, houses, inns, forts, hospitals, asylums, and graveyards—definitely graveyards. Any place where tragedy strikes or any place where a terrible injustice has been perpetrated has the potential to become haunted. But how can an entire region like the North Carolina Coast come to be known as haunted? Well, that’s »
beep Essay

“To Darkness, Fire, and Pain”

Sacred Harp Singing, Ruralness, and the Southern Gothic

by Jonathon M. Smith, Smith
On a late autumn evening in 2005, I drove an hour out of Atlanta to Holly Springs Primitive Baptist Church near Bremen, just a few miles east of the Georgia-Alabama border. The building sits only a few hundred feet from I-20, but the route to the church—about a half-mile past a gas station and through »
beep Politics

“We’re Going to Wake Up This Sleeping Giant”

Empowering Rural and Low-Income Voters to Reshape North Carolina

by Benjamin Barber
North Carolina’s rural and low-income voters are expected to have a significant impact on this year’s presidential election, directly challenging the misconception that individuals in rural and low-income areas lack interest in politics or have minimal impact on electoral results. Their increased involvement reflects the efforts of local civic engagement organizations, which actively work with »
beep Politics

There Has to Be Power

by Sherrilyn Ifill, Errin Haines
The following conversation took place on April 5, 2024, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as part of the thirtieth anniversary celebrations for the Center for the Study of the American South and Southern Cultures, and the launch of the journal’s special issue, The Vote, guest edited by Errin Haines. This conversation »
beep Photo Essay

Not By Ourselves

Showing Up in Western North Carolina

by Jesse Barber
It’s hard to believe it has been ten days since the storm. During that time, I’ve driven almost one thousand miles getting into communities that were devastated by Hurricane Helene and running supplies to folks. I traveled to Marion, Swannanoa, Hendersonville, Brevard, Rosman, Ashe County, Chimney Rock, and Bat Cave. In the first few days, »
beep Memoir

I Might Need a New Story

Post Helene in Damascus, Virginia

by Jim Harrison
I direct an outdoor program at a small college in Southwest Virginia, and if you work at a small, private college, a significant part of your job is recruiting, selling the value of the institution to prospective students. For a college in Southwest Virginia, it’s also been about selling the value of place. I tell »
beep

We Called You in Her Name

by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Michelle Lanier, Johnica Rivers
Dear Reader: These excerpts—from a welcome by Michelle Lanier and Johnica Rivers and lyrical essay, “Written by Herself,” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs—first appeared in A Sojourn for Harriet Jacobs, a chapbook created by The Harriet Jacobs Project to commemorate their inaugural journeys. * * * We called you in her name. You answered. We rang the »
beep Poetry

The Buford Highway Farmers Market

by Diamond Forde
DO you remember flirting at the fish counter on Thursdays? At the Buford Highway Farmers Market—dark corners, concrete floors, & flags winking in an industrial breeze.
beep Back Porch

Taking Up Space

by Regina N. Bradley
“Sojourning is a daring act of freedom-making and . . . an acknowledgment of reclamation of spaces where Black women and femme folks were historically excluded.” I’m in Edenton, North Carolina. I’m here to do some sacred work. I slowly turn the bowl of white rose petals in my hands. They are moist from freshly »
beep Memoir

Down South

by Jet Toomer
“The longing for home never ceased, and the sojourn Down South would develop into a summer tradition.” For most of my young life I was denied the truth about my southern Black heritage, and the urbanized Americanized culture around me was teaching me to be ashamed. Of course, this dark skin, these pronounced and molded »
beep Art

In the Swamp

Abolition. Imagination. Play.

by Kai Lumumba Barrow, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, Alexis Pauline Gumbs
“There are so many different ways that people constructed home in places that one would not desire for home.” On my most recent outing with the Black feminist abolitionist revolutionary artist (and dear mentor of mine) kai lumumba barrow, we went looking for Spanish moss for one of her world-unmaking installations. When she pulled up »
Subscribe today!

One South, a world of stories. Delivered in four print issues a year.

Subscribe