Writing Back to History: A Conversation with Kiese Laymon
Kiese Laymon discusses his new memoir, HEAVY.
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Posts Tagged: Southern
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #125: Tyree Daye
“I think if you are really doing the work, you can’t write about America and not explore race and slavery, and that goes for any writer.”
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Voices on Addiction: The Honeybee
She never stopped, a bee buzzing from flower to flower to flower, collecting all the sweetness she could.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Everything We Ever Needed
I tried to forget again that I once meant to leave, that on a few occasions I had actually felt transported by love.
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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.
...moreCrybaby College Students and Their Bogus Trophies
I’m a small blue dot living in a blood-red corner of a red state, so I’ve grown accustomed to hearing right wing talking points. I don’t like them, but they surface as regularly in my southwest Florida town as white egrets on the highway and dolphins in the Gulf. Talking points at the grocery store, […]
...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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Wanted/Needed/Loved: Kurt Wagner’s One-of-a-Kind Hat
I try not to think about fashion. It’s more that I want to settle on something to wear so I don’t have to think about it.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #55: Donald Ray Pollock
Donald Ray Pollock has been steadily serving up plates of mild horror since his first book of short stories, Knockemstiff, appeared in 2008. Pollock followed the explosion of Knockemstiff with The Devil All the Time, in 2011, his first novel, which also bordered on the genre of mystery, again with generous servings of darkness. His […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Brian Booker
Brian Booker discusses his debut collection Are You Here For What I’m Here For?, giving characters strange and unusual names, and sleeping sickness.
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R.I.P.: Odd Habits
I would really like to see a coming back or recreation of funeral rites. Let’s create new ones. Let’s take this matter into our own hands.
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Southern Girl: Beyoncé, Badu, and Southern Black Womanhood
None of the imagery of Lemonade is foreign to those of us who grew up in the South or who have Southern roots.
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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: Angel Nafis, Safia Elhillo, and Elizabeth Acevedo
I don’t think it ever fully sunk in for me that I even live in America.
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The Conversation: Jeremy Clark and Thiahera Nurse
I’m thinking about the difference between “I stay somewhere” and “I live somewhere.”
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The Conversation: Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib and Paul Tran
The sitting down to write, convincing myself that my voice matters, even though there are so many telling me that it doesn’t.
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The Conversation: Cortney Lamar Charleston and Danez Smith
The South is my favorite cousin.
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Guildtalk #4: The Rumpus Interview with Saeed Jones
Saeed Jones talks about his forthcoming memoir How Men Fight For Their Lives, his new fellowship program at BuzzFeed, and making peace with the phantom.
...moreSong of the Day: “Hard To Tell”
The genre of bluegrass receives its fair share of criticism. Considered by some to be a backwater of the teeming estuary of American music known as country, bluegrass, characterized by a decidedly twangier sound, gets unfairly stereotyped as the redneck’s music of choice and relegated to straw-chewing Appalachian family reunions and backyard barbecues. But innovative and technically-gifted bands […]
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