Before the First Book: A Roundtable Discussion
With Gabrielle Bates, I.S. Jones, and Erin Marie Lynch.
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Posts Tagged: Alabama
A Poet of Ecology: Talking with Kate Gaskin
Kate Gaskin discusses her debut collection, FOREVER WAR.
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If My Body Were a House
Where my masculinity dwells, I am in control.
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Asking the Right Questions: Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom
Transcendent Kingdom becomes an experiment in itself.
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Freedom Knows Who We Are: Talking with Kelly Harris-DeBerry
Kelly Harris-DeBerry discusses her debut poetry collection, FREEDOM KNOWS MY NAME.
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Does It Matter Why
I refuse to play the part, but I play the part.
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This Week in Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
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Queering the Southern Gothic: A Conversation with Genevieve Hudson
Genevieve Hudson discusses her debut novel, BOYS OF ALABAMA.
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Scientific, Healing Magic: How to Know the Flowers by Jessica Smith
A poem by Jessica Smith yields the feeling that atoms of meaning vibrate, then come together.
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How to Become a Poet: A Conversation with Ashley M. Jones
“You don’t have to drink yourself into the Great American Poetry Masterpiece.”
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
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A Life of Words: A Conversation with Chip Livingston
Chip Livingston discusses his new novel, Owls Don’t Have to Mean Death, his move to Uruguay, his writing life, and the significance of owls.
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Dispatches from the Swamp: The Babble in the Bubble
To the extent that America—that great big word that makes us all so anxious—exists at all, it exists as a vast and noisy sheet of bubble wrap.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
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To Look for America: A Road Trip, a Soundtrack
One thing I was taught about travel—because my father is a black man born in Alabama in 1950—was that there are safe places for black people to go and places that aren’t as safe.
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Peeping under the Goddamn Door: The Price of Empathy in S-Town
[F]or the first time, I really see the tradeoffs between privacy and honest-to-god, up-close empathy.
...moreThis Week in Essays
For the Passages North blog, Jennifer Maritza McCauley discovers a connection to Rosa Parks and goes to Alabama in search of answers. Can you go home again to a place you’ve never been? Enuma Okoro writes for Aeon on moving to Nigeria to escape America’s problems.
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The Rumpus Interview with Yaa Gyasi
Yaa Gyasi discusses her debut novel Homegoing, growing up in Alabama, the multiplicity of black experiences, the legacy of slavery, and her writing process.
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The Conversation: Jayson Smith and A. H. Jerriod Avant
My responsibility is to not be negligent and cause unnecessary harm. To a listener or reader. My allegiance is only to truth.
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The Conversation: José Olivarez and Nate Marshall
There are so many spaces in this country where I feel unsafe particularly because of my body.
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The Conversation: Cortney Lamar Charleston and Danez Smith
The South is my favorite cousin.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Swans and Other Lies
As she presses against Patterson, she feels her feet softening, losing gravity. He’s embracing her, willing her to disappear, swallowing her.
...moreLove and Loss at the Unclaimed Baggage Center
At Racked, Stephie Grob Plante muses on the melancholy-yet-hopeful experience of shopping at the Unclaimed Baggage Center, a family-run business that sells items from lost luggage that was never reunited with its owner: So here I am, in Alabama, at the Unclaimed Baggage Center, overcome with wanting to know: when I lost, what did I find? There’s […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Tyler Gartzman
Rapper Tyler Gartzman talks about getting high, hypothetically making out with George Bush, not getting laid since high school, and how a white, Jewish kid in Atlanta became a talented hip-hop wordsmith.
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Against Everything
The mountains of Alabama are small mountains—foothills, really—but they are mine like a sports team is mine—like a football game (which I have for so long been near but have not really, really seen) is mine—as in the phrase “We scored! We scored!”
...moreA Different Kind of Courtroom Battle for Harper Lee
Well, this is all rather awkward: Harper Lee, who is now 87 and in an assisted-living facility, is suing the gift shop of a museum in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, for trademark infringement. The museum, “built around a refurbished version of the courtroom” from To Kill A Mockingbird, already got rid of gift-shop items like “Calpurnia’s […]
...moreThe Next Letter for Kids: Irene Latham
Exciting news: The next Letter for Kids, going out this Thursday, is from Irene Latham! Poetry editor of the Birmingham Arts Journal, Irene has written two novels for kids: Leaving Gee’s Bend and Don’t Feed the Boy. Dear Wandering Wildebeest, forthcoming in 2014, is her third collection of poetry—but her first collection of poetry for young readers. Not bad […]
...moreAlbums of Our Lives: Arkadelphia’s Untitled and Never Released Album
He sounds so young on the recordings now. After all, he was young when he wrote most the songs.
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