Salvation South

Three poets from Florida, Tennessee, and Virginia offer visions of their fathers.

Between 1912 and 1932, a collaboration between a Black educator and a Jewish businessman produced 5,000 school buildings in which more than 600,000 African American children in the South were educated.

Grief is an eternal shape-shifter. One of Appalachia’s most resonant voices guides us through it with three poems.

As we celebrate Pride Month, our editor prays that our beloved South will rise above old ways that bring hate where there should be love.

A jazz player who grew up roaming the banks of the Mississippi produces a musical meditation on life’s most essential element.

He grew up in Mississippi and didn’t come out until he was thirty-one. Here is his letter to LGBTQ+ kids—words he wishes someone had shared with him years earlier.

As a child, she saw only the difference between the simple food in her home and the fancier fare on her friends’ tables. Years later, she would see more clearly.

In this centennial year of the North Carolina banjo legend’s birth, bluegrass wizard Tony Trischka extols his Earlness with a masterful tribute.

From northwest Virginia, two poems on the depths of persistence and the limits of our knowledge.

My father believed a simple mental picture of history could make anyone a lifelong learner. So, he developed a three-century “Time Map.” The education establishment wasn’t interested.

Mesha Maren’s third novel, out this week, is a landmark achievement for a new generation of Appalachian writers who assert their right to be fully queer and fully mountaineer.

Chock full of images, an ode to the spirit of the New South.