Salvation South

Coming from Louisiana and working in Germany, an anthropologist calls both places home—and so must reckon with two dark histories.

A posthumous collection of stories from Mississippi’s Brad Watson, who left a legacy of beautiful fiction, is just out. Alabama novelist Caleb Johnson, a student of Watson’s, has this remembrance.

Some things we can let go of. Other things we can stash in the bottom drawer. But the best things can stay in your heart forever.

Salvation South will be on vacation for a couple of weeks. Our next batch of new stories is set for July 21.

Cleaning insect innards off his mother’s windshield was this ecologist’s childhood chore of choice. Pesticides and climate change had mostly negated the need to scrape bugs—until the Great Southern Brood of cicadas descended this May.

From Georgia by way of Brooklyn, three poems weaving pleasure, wholeness, and spirits.

Sherri McCoy’s service to the unhoused people of Atlanta is an exercise in radical selflessness.

Maddie Stambler’s first short documentary tells the story of a lifelong friendship. Some might call her bond with her subject “unlikely.” Maddie calls it transformational.

She grew up in a bicultural family with deep roots in South Carolina. The product of two rich storytelling traditions, she now captures on film the dualities of the South—and of her own life story.

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.