Anne Spencer’s ecosystem of art and activism
As I read, I fell in love with Anne Spencer’s fierceness and wit. In some ways, she reminded me of my own grandmother—a voluble woman, gardener, and scrawler of notes on the back of lists. Finding Spencer’s scraps, I felt the same sort of matriarchal literary presence amid the dailiness of domestic life: glimpses of how an ambitious, literary-minded woman might manage a house.
A feature essay from the Fall 2018 issue.
Prine radiates a sense of well-being, along with a sort of amused nonchalance toward potential disaster. This is a good thing, because the Coupe, as it turns out, has no passenger-side safety belt. Or rather it has the shoulder belt, but the thing on the seat into which it is supposed to latch is missing. I noticed this awhile back, and it worried me for a few minutes. But then I thought, If you’re going to buy the farm it might as well be in a ’77 Coupe de Ville with John Prine.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
San Antonio is the patron saint of lost causes, and Rolando created a statue of him in faux-marble white with the Alamo perched like a hat, except that the saint is upside down, so the Alamo is at his feet. When you want something, Rolando says, you flip the statue upside down.
What’s that? Who’s Cosmo, you say?
The Oxford American magazine’s celebration of its twentieth annual Southern Music issue, this year featuring North Carolina, will be held Monday, November 26 – Saturday, December 1, 2018. This weeklong celebration, co-presented by Hillsborough, North Carolina-based Yep Roc Records, and designed in partnership with North Carolina-native singer-songwriter Tift Merritt, will be comprised of music events featuring a Statewide Singing Circle and literary readings highlighting stories from the issue.
A poem from the Fall 2018 issue.
A young couple scutters by
On a motorbike. Harley, I think.
On their way to the beach. I can
See his feet are bare, resting inches
From the muffler’s burning heat—oh
The recklessness of young men
That makes them so exciting
To fuck, and sends them off
To war, whistling and marching.
A Points South essay from the Fall 2018 issue
I've come to have a friendship with a raven in Paris. I call him Cleitus, a name that I picked up from a Dukes of Hazzard episode or Greek mythology. The fact that it could be either reveals much about my raw ingredients, the stuff from which I am made.
A Points South essay from the Spring 2019 issue
My family has laid claim to a variety of nationalities and regional affiliations, yet there are still questions I reflect on from time to time regarding my own claim to my current home. Am I a Southerner, and do I have a right to call myself a Southerner? Will others recognize me as a Southerner, despite my lack of accent and because of my Asian face? And what does it mean to take on this identity—what does it mean for me to claim Dixie?
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
I’ve long struggled with my feelings toward the South End, having never loved the place the way I thought I should. Both my parents rhapsodize about the segregated black communities of their origins. But whereas their tales communicated the wills of their neighbors to persevere, my community seemed intent on trumpeting its hardship.
For over a year and a half, on the southeast corner of Lake Okeechobee, Sofia Valiente has befriended, lived among and photographed the residents of Miracle Village, an intentional community of over one hundred convicted sex offenders.
A Conversation with Dr. Terrence Roberts and Mary Liuzzo Lilleboe
My commitment to non-violence is not shaped by the actions or attitudes of others. It is my firm conviction that membership in the human family demands that I treat my family members with respect, that I do unto them what I would have them do unto me.
A Points South essay from the Fall 2018 issue
For the past year, five Vanderbilt researchers and historians, myself included, have collected oral histories related to this site—a Union fort largely built by enslaved and free African Americans, many of whom died during its construction. We’d gathered the stories of descendants of the laborers who built the fort and the soldiers who protected it. That Saturday, we’d unveil our work, though unveil felt like a grand word for what we’d amassed—largely two fifteen-minute video interviews. But there it was, printed just beside our project’s name on the event poster. FORT NEGLEY DESCENDENTS PROJECT: NASHVILLE'S BLACK LEGACIES OF THE CIVIL WAR. The name is clunky, a little wordy. But it has to hold so much.
