COME IN AND STAY AWHILE

Stories

Not Built on Nothing

It’s odd—maybe even a little upside-down—how what you find in the attic can prove to be the foundation of your life.

Devotions Over and Over

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

Dust and Mercy

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

How to Write a Ballad

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.”

I Heard Them All Speak

Alabama Poet Laureate Ashley M. Jones creates entire worlds in three new poems and affirms the power of poetry to help us see others and ourselves.

Just the Right Amount of Sunflowers

Three dazzling new poems by Mississippian C.T. Salazar, and an interview on binaries, ecologies, and the mysteries of time.

What It’s Like to Live Here

Veteran South Carolina poet Ray McManus, the winner of the 2023 Governor’s Award for the Arts, writes beautifully about rural life—from boar hogs to pickup trucks to the hunger that won’t go away.

Taylor Swift Didn’t Talk to Our Southern Poets

Tay Tay says poets are “tortured.” Jacqueline Allen Trimble turns that assumption inside out.

Revise Your Eyes

Junious “Jay” Ward, Charlotte’s inaugural Poet Laureate, serves up three new poems and talks about how his new post lets him “take the church to the people.”

The Secret Signal to Wake

Cumberland Gap poet Denton Loving talks about changes in Appalachian culture and offers four new poems that apply the wisdom of nature to the human predicament.

Guiding Us Home

From Washington, D.C., three poems honoring ancestry and excavating history.

A Monster Truck Passes the Poetry Reading

Let’s not get so cultured we’re blind, folks.

The Space Dividing Us Must Be Destroyed

Four new poems by—and an in-depth conversation with—Kentucky’s Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.