October 12, 5:00–6:30 PMCenter for the Study of the American South410 E. Franklin Street, Chapel HillFree & open to the public A conversation about Welty’s life and legacy, with Michael Pickard and Durham photojournalist Kate Medley, co-authors of the Welty photo essay in Southern Cultures, and William Ferris, folklorist, emeritus professor of history, and friend of Welty’s. Refreshments »
October 12, 3:00–5:00 PMCenter for the Study of the American South410 E. Franklin Street, Chapel HillFree & open to the public This two-part program will start with a book discussion of One Writer’s Beginnings with Michael Pickard, the Eudora Welty Chair of Southern Literature at Millsaps College. Those who register for this event will receive a copy »
Music
On August 26, 1967, the Lads of Liverpool (a.k.a. the Beatles) yielded the no. 1 spot on Billboard’s pop chart to an unknown musician. Mississippian Bobbie Gentry’s iconic song, “Ode to Billie Joe,” remained in that space for four weeks. During that time, her audience latched onto what seemed to be a mystery in the »
Photo Essay
We’re not 8 AM folks. So we mostly missed the start of William Ferris’s courses on Southern Music and Southern Literature, which he long held down the hall at our home in the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC. Instead, we tended to catch Bill filing out of the classroom with »
Southern Cultures is an excellent resource for the study of visual representations of the South. Images accompany all essays, and in some cases, the images comprise the essay. Illustrations come from archives and from contributors’ own collections, many times representing the work of an author on a single, in-depth documentary project. The visuals in Southern »
Interview
I met Margaret Walker Alexander in the fall of 1970 when I taught my first class at Jackson State University. She and I both taught in the English Department, and I will never forget a lecture that Margaret gave to my students on Zora Neale Hurston. She and Zora had traveled similar roads as southern »
Honoring William Christenberry (1936–2016) Bill Christenberry was like a spiritual brother who explored his homeland in Hale County, Alabama, with a keen eye. Each summer he returned to document and photograph these familiar worlds. With his meticulous eye, he showed the weight of time on this landscape, tracking change as paint faded and peeled on »
Without ever stepping foot on southern soil, renowned literary translator Krastan Dyankov made southern writing—its language, narratives, and nuances—come alive in his native Bulgarian. “The translator—not only of fiction, but of any text—is the Pony Express for the culture,” Dyankov said. “A great responsibility and a true knowledge of the matter you work with is »
21c Fiction
Back when John Updike didn’t get it, Shannon Ravenel did. From her early days in New York publishing, to co-founding Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill and editing the essential New Stories from the South series for two decades, Ravenel has been at the fore of shaping and sharing southern literature. We recently sat down with »
Over our 22-year history, we’re proud to have published 22 articles by our esteemed colleague and friend William Ferris—from interviewing B.B. King to finding Faulkner in Bulgaria. William Ferris is one of the greatest documentarians of the twentieth-century South. His collection of photographs, audio, film, and writings at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Southern Folklife Collection encompasses some »
“Who could miss the blood-pounding rush of events that awful spring, with the bands playing, the girls cheering, elders looking proud and tearful, as scowls of disapproval already darkened against ‘tories’ and shirkers?” Robert Penn Warren is one of the unquestioned giants of twentieth-century southern culture. Poet, novelist, and reporter, he emerged as a younger »
“Some people were just nuts about them. And they also have a mystique around extraterrestrial stuff.” The Moon Pie is an icon in the American South, where both its image and its taste evoke memories of country stores and their agrarian worlds. If we Google Moon Pies, 3,060,000 (currently the number is 40,500,000) references appear »