COME IN AND STAY AWHILE

Stories

Smooth river stones in clear, flowing water with sunlight reflecting off the surface, evoking Mississippi’s natural beauty. In the upper right, the Salvation South New Poets Prize Honorable Mention badge highlights Jennifer Peterson’s award-winning Mississippi poems and her recognition as a Southern poet.

Every Place Is Home to Someone

This finalist for the New Poets Prize—also poet laureate for Hattiesburg, Mississippi—takes us on intricate tours of Saturday in a small town, the thin line between redemption and judgment, and how beauty and love unfold in everyday moments.

Living With Ghosts

Regret, a Chattanooga poet argues, is like a junkyard.

Stuck in the Past

How to fix yourself if you hold on too tightly to what used to be.

The Man Who Was a Town

College towns move us from the world of youth to the world of adulthood. For folks who went to college in Athens, Georgia, William Orten Carlton was the man who welcomed us to the new world.

Hungry Ghosts: A Film About Charles McNair

A film about the lauded Southern novelist — and Salvation South contributor — Charles McNair.

In Moments of Need and Crisis

Religious affiliation is falling, even in the God-haunted South. But chaplaincy is booming in hospitals, schools, prisons and other institutions. And it’s teaching us how to reach across barriers of faith.

Where No One is a Stranger

In Arkansas’ Salem Cemetery, everyone you meet is a friend, a neighbor, or maybe even one of your people.

“Georgia on My Mind” and Other Poems

Five Southern poems that smell like honeysuckle, mountain laurel, moss and tomatoes.

A Taste of the Divine Nectar

Zoh Amba is a rarity — a white woman saxophonist, from Appalachia, no less — playing “free jazz” in New York and around the world. But to pigeonhole her into a “hillbilly exotica” tale would be to devalue the hard work of a woman whose music fearlessly chases the divine.

Dolly Parton: The Salvation South Interview

Legendary music writer Holly Gleason talks to the South’s most beloved star about love, forgiveness and how to live life with an open mind and an open heart.

The Deep Wisdom of Dolly

It just may be that everything we need to know about living life, we can learn from Dolly Parton.

The Act of Being Human

Tennessee’s Adeem the Artist sounds country — truly and deeply country — but every sharp lyric and wicked guitar twang challenges our notions of what “country” really means.

Appalachian Action Verb

A poem about how a single word, in the mouths of Appalachians, can tell the world a great deal about how mountain folks see things.