Classroom
In a year of isolation, we took solace in stories. And in a year of heartbreak, loss, and conflict, we sought understanding. These are the articles our online readers turned to again and again in 2020. We start at the beginning. Our top two reads open with photographs of their authors cradled in a parent’s »
Music
On a sticky June Sunday in 1959, two people meet each other outside an eastern Kentucky hamlet called Daisy. A twenty-seven-year-old college grad living in New York City, the grandson of Russian Jewish immigrants, wants to experience the Great Depression, and he is listening for music that might work like time travel. The other man, »
Memoir
On August 28, 2020, Randall Kenan became an ancestor. As he took flight, local newspapers paid tribute. Southern writers mourned. And the Black queer southern writer who grew up in Chinquapin—a community woven together by hogs, Bibles, and tobacco—garnered praise from the likes of the New York Times and O Magazine. A few of us—Black »
Poetry
Crystal Simone Smith’s haiku is infused with a profound love for and appreciation of the natural world. As one of a growing community of Black haiku poets, Smith’s work is also that of an activist, born from her life as a Black woman and mother of two Black sons. Her words resonate as much-needed interventions »
Essay
Written one year after being denied admission to graduate school at UNC, Pauli Murray mourned the defeat dealt in her desegregation efforts by the Jim Crow–era campus oppressors. She grieved the “what ifs” of an inclusive Chapel Hill campus community but expressed a fortitude necessary for perseverance. Seventeen years later, she witnessed from afar the »
Interview
“I don’t think this is political, I think this is fact—we need to highlight that the struggle isn’t over.” From spring 2019 to spring 2020, the Southern Oral History Program undergraduate internship focused its study on the history of women’s suffrage in the United States. In anticipation of the Nineteenth Amendment’s centennial, interns interviewed members »
Interview
First things first: Representative Renitta Shannon, who represents Georgia’s 84th district in the state’s legislature, was raised a PK—a preacher’s kid. In her father’s Primitive Baptist church—one so doggedly literal that it frowned upon 11 a.m. Sunday communion because the practice debuted at the Last Supper, that world-changing evening meal—she absorbed and sometimes questioned the »
Interview
“I wasn’t aware that I was an undocumented person. And also wasn’t aware that all those people were undocumented. I just knew that they didn’t speak English and they needed support.” Maggie Loredo, an immigrant rights activist and a returnee to Mexico, speaks with Latinx studies scholar Perla M. Guerrero. In this conversation, we learn »
Essay
“Womanhood—how people experience being women—is an expansive historical category that includes more than just women.” Greta lingered just outside the downward-slanting entrance of the old warehouse on the edge of downtown Roanoke. A few decades earlier, this building was home to a restaurant equipment supply company, but by 1976 deindustrialization and suburbanization had taken hold »
Essay
Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Walker, Flannery O’Connor, Beth Henley, Alice Walker, Mary Karr, Jesmyn Ward. Women writers in every generation have left southern states in search of opportunities and in defiance of racial, economic, sexual, and gender-based oppression. Within the decades-long Great Migration of African Americans out of the region (and now back into it), »
Essay
In the heat of an Atlanta summer evening, the ALFA Omegas softball team took the field at Iverson Park. As an out-lesbian team organized by the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA), they were different from other softball lineups in the City League in 1974. The Omegas brought together ALFA members at varying skill levels—neophytes and »
Photo Essay
“The boundaries of traditional documentary tend to encourage a certain rigid empathy. When I was learning, it seemed like an emotional calculus I would never master.” While writing this from an isolation spurred by a novel corona-virus pandemic, I’m stressed for a million reasons. One is that I’m at my home in Mississippi when I »