American South

An Off-Kilter Epic

In a revival of Tennessee Williams’s rarely staged Orpheus Descending, small-town outcasts buck the codes of southern propriety. 

July 30, 2023

Curbstones on the Road to Modernism

Labeled “naïve” for his quickly-hewn limestone sculptures, the Nashville stonemason William Edmondson was anything but.

April 12, 2023

Jim Crow & William Faulkner

Faulkner didn’t enjoy much local popularity when he was alive, not even after he won the Nobel Prize. He told too many inconvenient truths, and even some of his relatives saw him as writing “dirty books for Yankees.”

August 28, 2020

An Interview with Jerry Mitchell

Among the murder cases that Jerry Mitchell investigated and got reopened were the 1963 assassination of Mississippi NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers, and the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers.

August 24, 2020

My Friend John Lewis

When, in the summer of 1962, I first saw him sitting in the corner of a small church in Cairo, Illinois, I knew who he was. John Lewis was a Freedom Rider.

August 21, 2020

A Brief History of Dangerous Others

The outside agitator trope has always been, at bottom, a way of putting dissidents in their place.

July 27, 2020

Picturing Climate Crisis in Miami

FloodZone lays Miami’s underlying fractures bare: street-level billboard renderings of new apartments are fenced off by rain-weathered chain-link and sidewalks fractured by flooding.

May 23, 2020

A Young Filmmaker’s Louisiana

There is an intergenerational black film community that helped bring Burning Cane to life, and twenty-year-old filmmaker Phillip Youmans seems well aware of the legacy he steps into.

March 7, 2020

Sally Mann’s Dark Diary of the South

Sally Mann’s photographs demonstrate that beauty can exist in the ruins of a destroyed building, a landscape overgrown with weeds, a familiar body made foreign by illness.

October 27, 2018

The Last Book Sale

In a summer when the shoreline temperature in the Little Arkansas River reached 98 degrees—bad news for catfish—should I really have attempted to bring a bunch of citified northerners into the heart of the heat, which peaked locally at 116? Well, yes. It’s just weather, as my popular hero Captain Woodrow Call often said if he heard a complaint. So I threw a book sale. Upward of 300,000 books went on sale in Archer City at public auction, which was conducted by the cracker-jack team of Addison and Sarova out of Macon, Georgia, where I gather the heat is wet rather than dry.

August 17, 2012