The Oxford American Literary Project is thrilled to welcome two new key staff members: managing editor Danielle A. Jackson and development director Adrienne Anderson.
An installment in our weekly photography series, Eyes on the South
In her series New Orleans & the Levees, Karen Halverson alternates between bright, uninhibited portraits and stark industrial landscapes, capturing the inherent tension of living in a city that is always sinking and the extraordinary engineering measures taken to protect it.
A Conversation with Nickole Brown
“And now? I’m still doing what I’ve always done—the only thing I know how to do—to use poetry to find words for those who have little voice of their own, to try to articulate stories without a ready language.”
A feature essay from the South Carolina Music Issue.
Funk is at once spiritual and pugilistic and reparative and confrontational. It does not demand you apologize for slavery but absconds over the Atlantic with its freedom and hovers over the water on the downbeat, wishing you would try to come steal it again. It buries itself deep in the dirt of a sea island and makes its rhythms shake the earth and then shoots out the ground on a spaceship.
A Points South essay from the South Carolina Music Issue.
I didn’t even know if I knew how to let go of the pain of my past. It has, after all, made me the woman I am.
A Points South essay from the South Carolina Music Issue.
We call it the Stono Rebellion because it started in a plantation district (a “general area of settlement,” in one scholar’s suitably vague phrase) known as Stono, which had taken its name from the river that ran near it, the Stono River, which had taken its name from a Native American tribe, the Stono or Stonoe or Stonowe, who when Carolina was founded in 1663 were settled close to Charles Town. By one of those dark coincidences history delights in, the Stono themselves are remembered principally (almost entirely) for having started an uprising against the colony.
A Points South essay from the South Carolina Music Issue.
Men and women—sometimes pairing off, sometimes dancing alone—cluster in the center of the club, lightly prancing just off their heels. In unison, the dancers then form a circle, shifting to the side counterclockwise from time to time, giving each other just enough space to continue moving their feet and legs. At times, they wind their bodies in place, moving unpredictably like twisting leaves in the wind. Whether they know it or not, for a moment or two, the dancers are linked back to their ancestors in coastal South Carolina in the previous century and, further back, in West Africa, also dancing—for tradition, for religious beliefs, for sheer joy.
Track 3 – “Down to the Graveyard” by Moon Pie
In clubs and bars they played ninety-minute shows, at the least, filled with three- to four-minute narratives about living in a town and wanting to get out, being away from home and wanting to return, hating a job, being unemployed and willing to work for the worst boss ever. Unrequited love. Main Street drag racing. Bad, bad radio station formats. Moon Pie was a mix of Springsteen, the Modern Lovers, Hank Williams, and the Blasters. Some years later I saw Jason and the Scorchers—a band I love—and thought, Moon Pie, back in the day.
An installment in our weekly photography series, Eyes on the South
Since its formation in 2012, the Bayou Corne sinkhole has become, as photographer Virginia Hanusik writes, “a symbol of industrial greed at the expense of the natural environment.”
A feature essay from the South Carolina Music Issue.
The thing that they do, I hesitate to say that you have to be there, but—there is an intimacy and devilment to their live performance, a lift and crash, that has been hard to capture on record. So that their art, like the lives they have carved out for themselves, is a thing on the move, uncatchable as a storm. Home and the road and home on the road.
An installment in our weekly photography series, Eyes on the South
Shawne Brown’s project, Evening Land, features work that began over fifteen years ago as what the artist describes as an “apocryphal portrait” of the country from his home state of Tennessee and stretching across the American Bible Belt.
A Points South essay from the South Carolina Music Issue.
Myrtle Beach has always capitalized on tourists’ desire to put a soundtrack to their vacations. Long before the days of the megachurch-style country music theaters, like the Carolina Opry and the Alabama Theatre, which would later dominate the north end of town, Myrtle Beach was a regular stop for the working musicians who toured the Southeast.
