As part of the Southern Studies Fellowship in Arts & Letters, I am researching the ways that communities access to news. According to the Local News Initiative, there has been a "net loss" of nearly 2,900 newspapers…
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“Specificity gives a reason for everything.”
Actor and writer Donnetta Lavinia Grays taught me that premise over a bowl of mac & cheese in NYC, perhaps a decade ago. When I wrote Who Killed Buster Sparkle?, I wanted to show the complex, brut honesty of a modern South. Two antagonists are…
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I feel the need to write you a letter that I never received.
As news focuses on a war building in the Middle East, divergent perspectives argue vehemently over the value of human life. Folded in the commentary are a thousand opinions on how politics, history, and zealotry are to blame for the fighting. Although this war may have temporarily shifted focus, it seems a pointed opportunity to remind you, as a queer kid, that you are not cast aside and forgotten.
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In some aspects, markers of Southern identity can sound clichéd and near-monolithic: sweet tea; church politics; kudzu, honeysuckle, and privet hedges. Yet, every Southerner understands the divergent vibrancy across the region, whether it’s as benign as the never-ending debate of vinegar vs tomato-based barbecue or as fraught as racial divisions in the Mississippi Delta.
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The strike of a tuning fork resonates foggy images for me of middle school science experiments and the distinct elementary school smells of stale crayons and brown pungent erasers. Learning about the physics of sound waves and frequencies of vibrating objects didn’t dispel …
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