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Stories

The Editor’s Favorite Writing

Our editor-in-chief picks his favorite pieces from Salvation South in 2024.

After Another School Shooting, I Go to Work

Every day, millions of teachers and students face the possibility of violence. This Mississippi teacher is one of them.

High School Biology: A Confession

From a Tennessee teacher, a lesson on how life functions.

Everlasting Blue

How do you answer poverty, doubt, and worries about your kids? With the scent of sweet briar, the realness of animals, and a bridge in the dark.

Devotions Over and Over

Appalachian men and women: their weathered hands, the horseshoes over their doors, and the angels that watch over them.

Dust and Mercy

A poet from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina on landscape, family, and how we’re obligated to both.

How to Write a Ballad

Two lifelong friends—one a poet, one a painter–talk about it all: labor, joy, and love; the value of slowness; the subtleties of structure; and how to “make it soft, make it low.”

I Heard Them All Speak

Alabama Poet Laureate Ashley M. Jones creates entire worlds in three new poems and affirms the power of poetry to help us see others and ourselves.

Just the Right Amount of Sunflowers

Three dazzling new poems by Mississippian C.T. Salazar, and an interview on binaries, ecologies, and the mysteries of time.

What It’s Like to Live Here

Veteran South Carolina poet Ray McManus, the winner of the 2023 Governor’s Award for the Arts, writes beautifully about rural life—from boar hogs to pickup trucks to the hunger that won’t go away.

Taylor Swift Didn’t Talk to Our Southern Poets

Tay Tay says poets are “tortured.” Jacqueline Allen Trimble turns that assumption inside out.

Revise Your Eyes

Junious “Jay” Ward, Charlotte’s inaugural Poet Laureate, serves up three new poems and talks about how his new post lets him “take the church to the people.”

The Secret Signal to Wake

Cumberland Gap poet Denton Loving talks about changes in Appalachian culture and offers four new poems that apply the wisdom of nature to the human predicament.