Essay
In Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and writer Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, Trethewey writes poignantly of her reaction to Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain album cover while remembering the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of an ex-husband. “So this stays with me: a woman with an afro like the one my mother wore »
Poetry
I’ll eat when I’m hungry,…..I’ll drink when I’m dry;If the hard times don’t kill me,…..I’ll lay down and die. Those four forthright lines begin “Rye Whisky,” poem number 276 in The Oxford Book of Light Verse (1938), chosen and edited by W. H. Auden. But that can’t be how I first encountered them, on page »
Interview
In the mid-1970s, Sorrell Hays, a composer of electronic music, took her synthesizers, sound equipment, and contact mics to Dougherty County, Georgia. She was there to introduce children in newly desegregated classrooms to experimental forms of music-making. For Hays (1941–2020), it was a return to the South after almost two decades away and a confrontation »
Poetry
In a dream, you could do that. Hug someone you haven’t seen in years without crying.You could feel like you still lived in your old bedroom. You could go back to before likenothing, like magic, like the reverse of water down the drain. I wish I could have said what I wanted to then, but »
Essay
I grew up in a house full of books, three of which belonged to my dad. They were his wellworn Bible; How I Made a Million Dollars in Mail Order, and You Can Too; and The Foxfire Book. Published in 1972, The Foxfire Book carried the reader into the mountains of North Georgia, near the »
Essay
I recently visited Dublin, Ireland, and there were several restaurants serving Central Texas–style barbecue. Whether or not they were doing it well is another matter, but the point is that people around the world can’t seem to get enough of the cuisine. Barbecue is an ancient and now global method of food preparation whose history »
Interview
We are all makers, constantly using tangible and intangible tools to craft our reality. There is an intentionality around the life that Allan Jones has crafted for himself. The photographer, design enthusiast, and recreational beekeeper has an intimate relationship to his environment and activates the power of creativity to advance matters of justice. His work »
Art
“Research has revealed the names of more than 200 African American craftspeople working in stoneware manufacturing in the Edgefield District of South Carolina, a legacy spanning three generations.” I was raised with a keen awareness of the African American journey from slavery to freedom, inspired by stories from my late great-uncle, Rev. Albert E. Love, »
Interview
Drive through any town, anywhere, and among the essential food stores and gas stations there are repair shops. “There will always be a need for somebody to repair broken stuff,” said ceramics restorer Lenore Guston. “Because we’re humans, we’re breaking stuff all the time.” Over the last year and a half, with the support of »
Essay
“It is like alchemy to collect weeds, the plants that almost no one wants, and cook them up to create beautiful colors.” “If only you could see me in my natural habitat,” says Dede Styles. I know she’s right. Styles is a person so deeply connected to her place that something fundamental is lost as »
Essay
In today’s food and beverage world, the adjective craft often signifies more than technique or ingredients: it points to scale, agency, and audience, to small-batch creations just inventive enough to attract discriminating publics. Trace the word back, though, and its meanings broaden. As archaeologist and historian Alexander Langlands explains it, the Old English cræft referred »
Essay
On a September evening in 1934, Dr. J. Max Bond, the highest ranking African American official of the Tennessee Valley Authority, delivered an address to the Personnel Division Conference of the TVA. The federally owned TVA had launched the previous year, promising to bring social planning and electricity to the many rural and impoverished residents »