Essay
“For over six decades, craft has pulled me into a troubled and complicated American South where objects offer hints of meaning and voices of long-ago makers visible in stitches and thumbprints.” In this ruptured time in our nation and around the world, as we witness the rapidly diminishing window of opportunity for climate-related action, the »
Essay
My grandmother keeps texting me poorly lit pictures of cake pans from her kitchen in North Texas. She’s decluttering, an undiagnosed symptom of late-age grief for a life that didn’t quite turn out as she hoped. Her cake baking tools are the first to go. My grandmother was a professional cake baker and, while it »
Essay
In January of 2019, I began a “listening tour” across North Carolina as editor of Edible North Carolina, work that started in my food studies teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The vision for this book was to create a portrait of North Carolina’s vibrant contemporary food landscape. I chose twenty »
Essay
Letter from Jesse on March 10, 2019: Ana, What shall we plant next? Well . . . I will say I love the pansies year-round—momma used to grow squash & peppers in these pots next to our door at these apartments where we once lived. I’ve been thinking about greens a lot—I love honeysuckle & »
Photo Essay
The city of Baytown, Texas, home to the sprawling ExxonMobil refinery and across the ship channel from the San Jacinto Monument, sits on a peninsula jutting southwest into the upper reaches of Galveston Bay. It once housed the picturesque Brownwood subdivision, where, beginning in the 1950s, executives of Humble Oil lived midcentury dreams of postwar »
Poetry
In an interview with NPR, Brenda Graham recounts her experience after her brother was accused in the 1958 “Kissing Case” in Monroe, North Carolina. Yes; right there in the front yard where daddylonglegs skipped across blades of grass, dripping in white mob sweat from the night before; right there in the front yard whereChrist’s wooden frame was »
Essay
Silence is both a noun and a verb—defined as the absence of sound and the prohibition of speech, respectively. Silence is a gift and a curse. It is a tool for liberation and a tool of oppression. Silence is complex; it can communicate both rest and labor, compliance and resilience, humility and pride. Silence is »
Music
“I’d started to doubt the Gram Parsons myth, but I could still feel its narcotic lull.” Like many white Xennials, I learned about Gram Parsons late at night in a college dorm room, stoned and listening to somebody’s hippie parents’ records. Parsons played in the Byrds and taught the Rolling Stones about country music. He »
Music
“The music is a gift; it makes room for us.” As a young Black queer male growing up in South Carolina, I was fascinated by marching bands at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Involved in music programs at an early age, many of my music directors were HBCU alumni—South Carolina State, Savannah State, Fayetteville »
Essay
I. I grew up between Minneapolis and a small farm just outside the city on the occupied Indigenous homelands of the Dakota people in the Twin Cities and also of the Anishinaabe, or Ojibwe people, to the north. As an adult who has moved away from and returned to Minneapolis multiple times over the past »
Music
Summer is the season when the new recruits arrive. They are kids, eight or nine years old, and most have never touched an instrument. On June 20, 2019, I crowd into an air-conditioned classroom with about thirty of them, sitting on industrial carpet, facing forward. LeBron Joseph stands in front of the whiteboard writing out »
Memoir
Windy Gap Road twists up Little Brushy Mountain, dense forest on all sides until you crest the top and feel like you’re driving right into the sky. Follow the road a short way until it crosses Cling Johnson Road, named for my great-grandfather, and at the very end, you’ll hit the Johnson homestead: a medium-sized »