The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey discusses her new collection, MONUMENT: POEMS NEW AND SELECTED.
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Posts Tagged: Mississippi
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #150: Catherine Lacey
“Honestly, I couldn’t write a non-transgressive woman if I tried.”
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Writing Back to History: A Conversation with Kiese Laymon
Kiese Laymon discusses his new memoir, HEAVY.
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The Rumpus Mini-interview Project #137: Aimee Nezhukumatathil
“Admitting a love or joy, or yes, wonder for the natural world is, especially as a woman of color, one of the most vulnerable things we can do.”
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
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Ward’s Mississippi Is Our Mississippi: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Capturing the Delta in harrowing detail, Ward takes readers on a journey from her own home of the Gulf Coast to the Mississippi State Penitentiary.
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Rumpus Exclusive: An Excerpt from Alice Anderson’s Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away
His goal was to erase me.
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Finding the Finally: Alice Anderson Discusses Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away
Alice Anderson on her memoir, Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away, drag, and motherhood.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
A weekly roundup of indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 15): “Southern History”
We can’t hide from our history and we can’t pass it on to future generations.
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The Rumpus Interview with Jacqueline Woodson
Jacqueline Woodson discusses her latest novel Another Brooklyn, the little deaths of lost friendships, and her work with children across the country as the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate.
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #11: Politics, Madness, and Sanity
My family was always political, but I have a love/hate relationship with politics. Today, I can feel the country swinging towards madness. And make no mistake, a country can go mad. It is familiar territory, exciting and threatening, seductive and fearful. It feels good; it does NOT feel good. Or, if I may coin a […]
...moreThe Night Wash Jones Won
Eighty years ago, Wash Jones appeared as a minor character in William Faulkner’s masterpiece on American identity and self-invention, Absalom, Absalom! From a craft perspective Jones was put in for a purpose: to demonstrate the role that white working-class men played in maintaining white supremacy among the wealthiest people in America before the Civil War, […]
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Albums of Our Lives: Rosanne Cash’s Black Cadillac
In her voice, I am held, cradled even. I am equal parts longing and hope. I am home.
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #4: Keep the Change
This week, your Storming Bohemian has moved to a new house. Again. And so some reflections: There is much to be said for stability, I know. The steady quiet observation of the likes of Annie Dillard or Henry Thoreau evokes my admiration. I am even an oblate of a Benedictine monastery. I know monks who […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
This week, Guernica has a new story from author and veteran Odie Lindsey, whose debut story collection about soldiers coming home from war, We Come to Our Senses, will be published by W.W. Norton later this month. Included in the collection, “Bird (on back)” picks up in the middle of a disintegrating relationship between an […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Garrard Conley
Garrard Conley, author of the new memoir Boy Erased, discusses growing up in the deep South, mothers, writing for change, and political delusions.
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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.
...moreOur Literary Footpaths
Over at The Toast, Rebecca Turkewitz writes about the intersections between literary geography and the real, from Joyce’s Dublin and Tolkien’s Middle Europe to Faulkner’s Mississippi and Munro’s Ontario—how we explore these places by walking through pages, and how they map to our homes and street corners.
...moreUnderstanding Faulkner
Richard Grant discusses how his time living in Mississippi provided him with a more full understanding of William Faulkner’s language. Despite studying Faulkner at school in England, Grant felt that it wasn’t until he moved that he was able to totally appreciate Faulkner’s work: To sit on the old porch reading Mr. Bill, with a […]
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Armored in Cars and Driving Unseen
America is a beautiful country and it was beautiful before we got here. I’m not sure yet if we, the ancestral echo of colonizers, are a beautiful people. I often have doubts.
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Daisy Duke and the Manosphere
The story goes, if you can dehumanize a population with a stereotype, there’s no need to share their fate.
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The Rumpus Interview with Jamie Kornegay
Novelist Jamie Kornegay talks about his debut, Soil, life in Mississippi, writing humor effectively, and the geography of isolation.
...moreRemembering the Blue and the Gray
Memorial Day is a time of both national reflection and diverse local tradition. In a piece connecting poetry and community storytelling, The Atlantic offers some literary history in observance of this past weekend’s holiday. Two years after the end of the Civil War, the magazine published Francis Miles Finch’s conciliatory poem, “The Blue and The Gray.” […]
...moreWhen Schools Use the Police Station as a Principal’s Office
In Meridian, when schools want to discipline children, they do much more than just send them to the principal’s office. They call the police, who show up to arrest children who are as young as 10 years old. Arrests, the Department of Justice says, happen automatically, regardless of whether the police officer knows exactly what […]
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