Essay
“We all struggle with interior storms in these challenging times. Strength lies in action and solidarity.” This extraordinary Snapshot: Climate issue marks the beginning of a year and more of contemplation—and celebration—of the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of Southern Cultures and the Center for the Study of the American South in 1993. The issue’s »
Memoir
I have lived on a small farm in southern Vermont for the last thirteen years. One year, it simply did not snow, and the low-grade environmental anxiety I’d been swallowing blossomed into something ferocious, blocking my imaginative impulse. I felt as though I couldn’t write fiction anymore. I poured my energy into becoming an environmental »
Memoir
I misspent my youth wandering the mountains of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, spending as much time as I could on long camping trips into the backwoods. It was there that I found where my internal compass pointed, namely, toward a longing to understand how the earth and its environment worked, why and how »
Essay
“Compassion and action for the planet cannot exist without compassion and action for the people on it.” While visiting Sarasota, Florida, my husband agreed to join me in doing something I absolutely LOVE and completely unrelated to work—foot massages. We found a quaint little spot in a quiet retirement community. It wasn’t overly glamourous—average size »
Interview
Katharine Hayhoe is the Chief Scientist for The Nature Conservancy. She is also Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor and Endowed Chair in Public Policy and Public Law in the Public Administration program of the Department of Political Science at Texas Tech University. Hayhoe has published over 125 peer-reviewed abstracts and publications and coauthored Downscaling Techniques for High-Resolution »
Essay
Climate change is rapidly transforming our world in ways both visible and invisible. Greenhouse gas pollution—invisible to the human eye—is causing climate change, with widespread impacts to which we now bear witness. Rising temperatures have caused the loss of more than 28 trillion tons of Earth’s ice between 1994 and 2017, roughly the volume of »
Photo Essay
I get a trapped sick feeling as I pass Cash’s Convenience, where grass breaks through the gas pumps and the windows are dark as the creek. Already considering my escape, I drive the two-lane road that was straightened and paved before I was born, past fields on either side—fields I’ve studied, fields I’ve hunted, fields »
Interview
Psyche Williams-Forson and Tressie McMillan Cottom sat down at the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History on November 9, 2022, to discuss Williams-Forson’s new book, Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America. Their conversation has been edited and condensed for publication. Tressie McMillan Cottom: I have to tell you. My family is »
Poetry
I. Grandma Sarah holds mein a reservoir of unshed tears.bring her lips to my foreheadsuck something out.set meflowing,gasping. II. Mildred Thompson heckles my father,he finds his seat, and I leapfrom his skull, full-lotus, sucklingHigh John de conqueror root,a butterfly dancingup my spine. III. My mama leans back, legs akimbo,Paulette dances obeah, Fía peersinto the beyond,Able Mable »
Essay
“The southern Black imagination reforms, revises, and reclaims spaces where Black people are present but unwelcome, underserved, or unseen.” Rapper Pastor Troy gave me my first for-real lesson in southern Black geography back in 1999. I’d been living in Albany, Georgia, for about a year when Troy forcefully and confidently declared “ain’t no mo play in »
Essay
In October 1944, our ancestors Noah and Annie Riddick purchased roughly forty acres of land in Pantego, North Carolina. That land was both a homestead for sharecropping and, more important, a refuge for a southern Black family living at the height of Jim Crow. The land provided safety and sustenance for Noah and Annie’s eight »
Essay
In April 2018, I returned to the neighborhood in northeast Washington, DC, where, over the course of six years at that point, I had conducted ethnographic fieldwork. It was not my first time returning. Every time I went to DC after relocating, I tried to visit, at least stopping into the small grocery store where »