Salvation South

This award-winning Tennessee-based photographer captures the real and imagined places from the greatest Southern fiction.

A broad slate of community collaborations set in motion by Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival offered real sources of hope, not only for the city and its community, but also for people from other cities who came to be part of the experiment. This is the last in a three-part series examining the community engagement initiatives at Big Ears 2022.

Ray McManus, a South Carolina-based writer of poetry and prose, today graces Salvation South with seven — count ’em, seven! — new poems.

The writer Ann Hite has been obsessed with the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank since she was a young girl. This poem is based on a statement about the lynching from Frank’s wife, Lucille Selig Frank.

George Lancaster believes Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is setting some examples of a different — and better — form of patriotism.

How can a music festival transform a city? The Big Ears Festival in Knoxville is bringing the community together in ways folks never dreamed of only a few years ago. This is the second in a three-part series exploring how Big Ears is creating little miracles in Tennessee.

The Preservation Hall Brass Band and the East Tennessee Bluegrass Association find common ground in Dolly Parton.

Jodi Cash’s father passed away at the end of 2020. Ever since, the scenes of their relationship in her memory have been a movie she can’t stop watching.

A poem about the springtime rituals of a Southern home.

Salvation South’s Stacy Reece believes it’s time for a summer of rest and renewal.

Borscht, chemo and Southern hospitality: the story of how St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis stepped in to help Ukrainian children fleeing war and fighting cancer.

Since its inception in 2009, Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival has become one of the world’s foremost gatherings for music from outside the lines. But when it returned this year after a two-year COVID shutdown, it became something greater than a chance to hear music. Instead, it brought the Knoxville community together for a joyful, citywide celebration. Big Ears offers lessons in how to make joy happen for a whole town. This is the first of a three-part series in which Salvation South studies the Big Ears method.