Salvation South

For Mother’s Day, a look at mama through the eyes of North Carolina poets.

Last week, our editor wrote about a teacher who changed his outlook on the world. A poet who contributes regularly to us this week recalls how a simple correction from her teacher sparked a lifetime of reconsidering the story of the South.

We were taught the South’s greatest music sprung up in specific places, like the Mississippi Delta or New Orleans or Appalachia. Our teachers didn’t dig deep enough.

An unexpected inheritance came too late to raise her mother from poverty, but not too late for the state of Tennessee to claim the money for itself. A first-person look at how Southern states stack the deck against their working poor.

A North Florida cattleman looks back and wonders, what happens when you can no longer afford to love the thing you love the most?

It’s National Teacher Appreciation Week, so we’re doing exactly that—showing love and respect to the people who led us from confusion to inspiration.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.”