From J. Drew Lanham, MacArthur Genius Grant recipient and author of Sparrow Envy: A Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts, comes a sensuous new collection in his signature mix of poetry and prose.
In gorgeous and timely pieces, Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves is a lush journey into wildness and Black being. Lanham notices nature through seasonal shifts, societal unrest, and deeply personal reflection and traces a path from bitter history to the present predicament. Drawing canny connections between the precarity of nature and the long arm of racism, the collection offers reconciliation and eco-reparation as hopeful destinations from our current climate of division. In Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves, Lanham mines the deep connection to ancestors through the living world and tunes his unique voice toward embracing the radical act of joy.
You wish to never see a plum again in your life... You think: When I am an adult, I will never have a fruit tree. I will never be like this.
For fans of Sarah Rose Etter and Scott McClanahan, Plum is a darkly beautiful, unflinching novel about modern girlhood in the internet age, the daily toll of trauma, and the limits of love.
Told entirely in the second person, Plum follows J as she grows from kid to teen in a house ruled by her alcoholic dad and complicit mother. Her older brother is sometimes wonderful, sometimes gross, and he's her only hope of getting out. J's world is one of nail polish, above-ground pools, and drive-thrus--and of violence, carelessness, and so many rules. J covets the peace that comes when she slips on her headphones, turns on her handheld radio, and dreams of how she and her brother can make their escape.
When her brother leaves home and disappears, so does J's best chance to flee her parents' chaotic orbit. Alone and angry, J reaches through her computer screen for the life she wants: blonde hair, glittering nails, attention, freedom. As she stumbles into adulthood with no template to follow, J must figure out how to build a family for herself full of the love she deserves. In her brutally compelling debut, Anderegg turns her singular gaze on the generational patterns of addiction and abuse.
One of 2020's most acclaimed books. Winner of the Southern Book Prize - Winner of the Weatherford Award - A Kirkus Best Fiction Book of 2020 - One of O Magazine's Best LGBT Books of 2020 - - One of the Women's National Book Association's 2020 Great Group Reads Selections - EW's 50 Most Anticipated Books of 2020 - BookRiot - Lambda Literary's - Salon - BookPage's - Garden & Gun's - Logo NewNowNext's
In this brutally fresh kind of homecoming novel, (Entertainment Weekly) Brian Jackson returns to his small Appalachian hometown and the family who rejected him. Carter Sickels's stunning literary achievement deserves a place in the canon of AIDS literature alongside the likes of Larry Kramer and Rebecca Makkai (Los Angeles Review of Books).
The story of Brian's return to small-town Ohio is told in a chorus of voices: Brian's mother Sharon; his fourteen-year-old sister, Jess, as she grapples with her brother's mysterious return; and the video diaries Brian makes to document his final summer. Written in prose that seeks to answer without flinching away from ugliness and without demonizing the ignorant (Salon), The Prettiest Star offers an urgent portrait of a family in the center of a national crisis, in order to tell a unique story about the politics and fragility of the body, and to explore the bounds of family and redemption.
In this powerful debut memoir, Neesha Powell-Ingabire chips away at coastal Georgia's facade of beaches and golden marshes to recover undertold Black history alongside personal and family stories.
In May of 2020, Neesha Powell-Ingabire's hometown became infamous after a viral video spread of white vigilantes killing a Black man named Ahmaud Arbery. The small coastal city of Brunswick, Georgia became synonymous with this tragedy, which, along with the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, spurred an international movement that summer to end white supremacy.
Neesha Powell-Ingabire, a millennial journalist, essayist, and organizer, grew up in Brunswick feeling alienated as a Black queer and disabled girl in a fraught racial and political environment. Come By Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia's Geechee Coast traces the genealogy of systemic racial violence while paying homage to the area's long history of Black resistance and culture keeping. Powell-Ingabire probes her personal connection to past and present: the victorious campaign to remove Brunswick's Confederate monument out of a public park, modern echoes of ancestral practices such as farming, fishing, and basket weaving, the fight for Geechee land in Sapelo Island, and the mass suicide of the Igbo people, who drowned themselves in Dunbar Creek rather than be enslaved.
In Come By Here, Neesha Powell-Ingabire reckons with their home's collective history and their own history as a truth-telling exercise in line with Audre Lorde's advice: It is better to speak.
The Girl Who Became a Rabbit, is a book-length lyric, a dark, ruminative poem that pushes the limits of the prose-poetic form to explore how the body carries and shapes grief and what it means to tell a story.
Examining reclaimed narratives of embodiment, gentle hauntings, and fables of the body, Emilie Menzel approaches the body as a home we consciously build, spinning myths and fairytales as ways to rewrite the body's history.
In the spirit of Maggie Nelson and Max Porter, Menzel's writing is wild, lush, recursive, and intentionally messy. A mesmerizing and unique debut, The Girl Who Became a Rabbit intersects fable and trauma, femininity and creatureliness, and imagines the transformation of the body, perhaps, into language.
You are a rare bird, easy to see but invisible just the same. That thought is close at hand in Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts, as renowned naturalist and writer J. Drew Lanham explores his obsession with birds and all things wild in a mixture of poetry and prose. He questions vital assumptions taken for granted by so many birdwatchers: can birding be an escape if the birder is not in a safe place? Who is watching him as he watches birds?
With a refreshing balance of reverence and candor, Lanham paints a unique portrait of the natural world: listening to cicadas, tracking sandpipers, towhees, wrens, and cataloging fellow birdwatchers at a conference where he is one of two black birders. The resulting insights are as honest as they are illuminating.
From Minrose Gwin, award-winning author of The Accidentals, comes Beautiful Dreamers, a story of a precocious teen and her mother, their gay best friend, and the con man who unravels their family.
It's 1953 when Memory Feather and her mother, Virginia, are welcomed back home to the Mississippi Gulf Coast community of Belle Cote by Virginia's childhood friend Mac McFadden, whose verve and energy buoy the recently divorced Virginia to embrace this new chapter. Memory (Mem) is unlike other girls: she is attuned to the voices of plants and animals and is missing two fingers on her twisted left hand. The three of them knit their lives together and become a close, though unconventional, family.
While Mac's wealth, brains, and good humor have allowed him to carve out a niche in Belle Cote, his position as a gay man active in the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement exposes him to censure, harassment, and even brutality. When the unscrupulous and charismatic Tony Amato arrives in Belle Cote as Mac's guest, he sets in motion a series of events that will shatter familial bonds and forever change Mem's life. Now, an adult Mem recounts the story of the scars Tony left in her teenage years, confronting her culpability in the disastrous events of that final summer.
Sweeping, dramatic, and vividly rendered, Beautiful Dreamers is a novel of innocence and betrayal, love and intolerance, and the care and honesty we owe the families we choose.
A collection of fiction and graphic ephemera, Little Ones plays in a space of shadows and in-betweens.
Informed by Appalachian experience and traditions of Southern storytelling, these award-winning stories are populated by the world's dispossessed, disturbed, and disregarded: the quiet interior life of a passed-over laborer, the bedtime story a goose tells a snake about a boy named Grey, moments of a road-killed raccoon's afterlife, advice to the children of a future apocalypse.
These mischievous polyvocal tales are an exercise in audacity, in embracing the bizarre and carnivalesque within us. Grey Wolfe LaJoie employs uncanny wit and deep empathy to explore the way shame can turn into desperate violence, and to shed light on the smallest among us.
2023 Phillip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award Finalist
George Masa's Wild Vision recounts the incredible, overlooked life of the photographer George Masa.
Self-taught photographer George Masa (born Masahara Iizuka in Osaka, Japan), arrived in Asheville, North Carolina at the turn of the twentieth century amid a period of great transition in the southern Appalachians.
Masa's photographs from the 1920s and early 1930s are stunning windows into an era where railroads hauled out the remaining old-growth timber with impunity, new roads were blasted into hillsides, and an activist community emerged to fight for a new national park. Masa began photographing the nearby mountains and helping to map the Appalachian Trail, capturing this transition like no other photographer of his time. His images, along with his knowledge of the landscape, became a critical piece of the argument for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, compelling John D. Rockefeller to donate $5 million for initial land purchases. Despite being hailed as the Ansel Adams of the Smokies, Masa died, destitute and unknown, in 1933.
In George Masa's Wild Vision: A Japanese Immigrant Imagines Western North Carolina, poet and environmental organizer Brent Martin explores the locations Masa visited, using first-person narratives to contrast, lament, and exalt the condition of the landscape the photographer so loved and worked to interpret and protect. The book includes seventy-five of Masa's photographs, accompanied by Martin's reflections on Masa's life and work.
In her dynamic debut, Halle Hill's Good Women delves into the lives of twelve Black women across the Appalachian South.
A Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2023 in Fiction - One of Oprah Daily's Best Books of the Year One of Electric Literature's Best Short Story Collections of 2023 - Featured in People Magazine's Best Books of Fall - One of the Boston Globe's 20 Books We're Excited to Read This Fall - One of Kirkus's 20 Best Books To Read in September - Poets & Writer's Page One New and Noteworthy - One of the Southwest Review's 10 Must Read Books of 2023 - Finalist for the 2024 Weatherford Award in Fiction - Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalist
A stunning slow burn brimming with observation, emotion, and incident. --Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
A fantastic firecracker of a collection I'll return to again and again! --Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
A woman boards a Greyhound bus barreling toward Florida to meet her sugar daddy's mother; a state fair employee considers revenge on a local preacher; a sister struggles with guilt as she helps her brother plan to run away with a man he's seeing in secret; a young woman who works for a scam for-profit college navigates the lies she sells for a living.
Darkly funny and deeply human, Good Women observes how place, blood-ties, generational trauma, obsession, and boundaries--or lack thereof--influence how we navigate our small worlds, and how those worlds so often collide in ways we don't expect. Through intimate moments of personal choice, Hill carefully shines a light on how these twelve women shape and form themselves through faith and abandon, transgression and conformity, community, caution, and solitude.
With precision and empathy, Hill captures the mundane in moments of absurdity, and bears witness to both joy and heartbreak, reminding us how the next moment could be life-changing. Vibrant and exacting, Hill is a must-read new voice in literary fiction.
For fans of Americana music and a beer after mowing the lawn, The Last Saturday in America confronts the long shadow of Southern masculinity.
The Last Saturday in America is set in a nation on the precipice of great change. Through examinations of suburban neighbors, bullies, gun violence, and vasectomy appointments, Ray McManus draws a portrait of American masculinity in the face of political division, pandemic, and cultural warfare. McManus's speaker is caught between the way he was raised and the future he wants to see for who he is raising. He can no longer rely on what he thought he knew, nor does he know what to do about it. The man rendered in these pages is a father, a son, a Southerner. And he is willing to burn it all down and start something new, only to see that the new start he is looking for has been with him the whole time.
A New York Times Books New & Noteworthy book - A Most-Anticipated Book from BookPage, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Paperback Paris - Glowing reviews and features in Garden & Gun, CNN Philippines, Chapter16, Kirkus Reviews, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and more
This fierce collection celebrates the incredible diversity in the contemporary South by featuring essays by twenty-one of the finest young writers of color living and working in the region today, who all address a central question: Who is welcome?
Kiese Laymon navigates the racial politics of publishing while recording his audiobook in Mississippi. Regina Bradley moves to Indiana and grapples with a landscape devoid of her Southern cultural touchstones, like Popeyes and OutKast. Aruni Kashyap apartment hunts in Athens and encounters a minefield of invasive questions. Frederick McKindra delves into the particularly Southern history of Beyonce's black majorettes.
Assembled by editor and essayist Cinelle Barnes, essays in A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South acknowledge that from the DMV to the college basketball court to doctors' offices, there are no shortage of places of tension in the American South. Urgent, necessary, funny, and poignant, these essays from new and established voices confront the complexities of the South's relationship with race, uncovering the particular difficulties and profound joys of being a Southerner in the 21st century.
Part coming-of-age summer romance, part thriller, Bomb Island is a funny and fast-paced Southern novel exploring subculture communities, survival, and found family set on an island near an unexploded atomic bomb.
Summer is in full swing on Bomb Island, Georgia. Fifteen-year-old Fish lives in a commune on the three-mile stretch of sand with his chosen family: their mother-sage Whistle and her white tiger, Sugar, a young man named Reef, and an old man named Nutzo, who is still missing. Fish and Whistle spend the days leading tours in their glass bottom boat out to the barrier island's namesake, an unexploded atomic bomb.
This is the summer when Fish meets Celia, the tattooed daughter of a troublesome local charter fisherman bent on exposing Whistle's commune--and their illegal tiger. When a party at her dad's place goes sour, Fish brings Celia back to Bomb Island in the hope that she'll stay there with him. But they still can't find Nutzo, the tiger's behavior has become increasingly erratic, and everyone's summer is about to take a strange, dark turn.
Narrated by an ensemble cast of uniquely independent outsiders who have chosen counter-culture lives informed by their desires and past traumas, Bomb Island takes a rollicking journey through the weirds and wilds of Coastal Georgia. Stephen Hundley has crafted a spirited, zany novel with a big heart that examines the strength it takes to live freely and without shame.
New neighborhoods began emerging north of Main Street in Spartanburg, South Carolina in the 1870s as emancipated Black men and women spent their hard-won post-slavery wages to purchase lots and build homes. As the decades rolled by, they and their descendants established a string of neighborhoods encompassing hundreds of houses, stretching from modern-day Barnet Park to the edge of Spartanburg Medical Center.
North of Main is the story of how this district rose and how it disappeared. In its pages, meet the pioneering Black men and women who lived and worked in these early neighborhoods: clergymen, educators, newsmen, artisans, attorneys, physicians, activists, musicians, caregivers, and more. In the face of frequent oppression, they laid a strong foundation for those who followed them. The history of the place they built is extraordinary in its demonstration of the heroism, courage, determination, and pride of Black citizens of Spartanburg who built dynamic and historically significant neighborhoods in treacherous times.
This title is the most in-depth Spartanburg Black history book ever produced, particularly for the years post-emancipation, and a sequel to the classic 2005 Hub City Press book, South of Main. This beautiful 250-page hardcover book also includes over 150 historic photographs and maps.
In 130 ink-and-watercolor drawings, the story of one year on a family farm in Kentucky unfolds in captured moments of daily life: Donahue chopping wood, a cow sniffing her head, her daughter tending to goats after a hard day at school. Each visual is paired with a written reflection on the day's doings, interwoven with the longer-arc history of her family, the farm, and their community. In telling the story of a farm family's struggle to survive and thrive, Landings grapples with the legacy of our cultural divide between art and land, and celebrates the beauty discovered along the way.
Texas Institute of Letters Award finalist for Best First Book of Poetry
In El Rey of Gold Teeth, Reyes Ramirez explores living in America as a first-generation American of Salvadoran and Mexican descent, living among conflicting histories.
Through the voices of an astronaut, a tennis player, a drag queen, family members, an alternate version of the self, and even a turtle, these propulsive poems embody the many marginalized voices demanding to be remembered in a nation that requires erasure of histories.
Colonizing languages and subverting forms, rerouting histories, and finding the mundane made extraordinary, El Rey of Gold Teeth breaks open notions of destiny, in humorous and devastating ways, to reimagine the past and present a new future where lack transforms to abundance, where there will be many answers to every question. Reyes Ramirez's debut poetry collection plays in spaces of both elegy and joy, and introduces a vibrant new talent.
Reparations Now! asks for what's owed.
In formal and non-traditional poems, award-winning poet Ashley M. Jones calls for long-overdue reparations to the Black descendants of enslaved people in the United States of America. In this, her third collection, Jones deftly takes on the worst of today--state-sanctioned violence, pandemic-induced crises, and white silence--all while uplifting Black joy. These poems explore trauma past and present, cultural and personal: the lynching of young, pregnant Mary Turner in 1918; the current white nationalist political movement; a case of infidelity. These poems, too, are a celebration of Black life and art: a beloved grandmother in rural Alabama, the music of James Brown and Al Green, and the soil where okra, pole beans, and collards thrive thanks to her father's hands.
By exploring the history of a nation where Black oppression's not happenstance; it's the law, Jones links past harm to modern heartache and prays for a peaceful world where one finds paradise in the garden in the afternoon with her family, together, safe, and worry-free. While exploring the ways we navigate our relationships with ourselves and others, Jones holds us all accountable, asking us to see the truth, to make amends, to honor one another.
South Arts' Southern Prize and State Fellowships for Literary Arts acknowledge, support, and celebrate the highest quality literary work being created in the American South. Beginning in 2024, the State Fellowships for Literary Arts will be awarded to writers with a commitment to literary excellence as evidenced by the quality of their work. This anthology contains the nine selected stories and excerpts chosen from the hundreds submitted for consideration over the previous year. The cohort of nine State Fellows included here were selected through a two-tiered selection process by a national jury. Jurors made their selections based on artistic excellence as reflected in the application package (writing sample and artist's statement) that reflects and represents the diversity of artistic expression of the region.
This collection features work from Ashley Blooms, Camille Boxhill, F.E. Choe, Constance Collier-Mercado, Melissa Ginsburg, Joanna Pearson, Randi Pink, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, and Yurina Yoshikawa. The selected stories are accompanied by an introduction by South Arts Board Member John T. Edge and foreword by South Arts President and CEO, Suzette M. Surkamer.
South Carolina is a state of incredible African American history: from the lunch counter in Rock Hill where the Friendship Nine began their Jail, No Bail protests, to the site where the freedom song We Shall Overcome was first sung; our nation's very first school for the formerly enslaved, to a monument to the Middle Passage championed by Toni Morrison. Visitors and residents alike will find the Palmetto State rich in remarkable places that played a part in some of our nation's most significant moments. The Green Book of South Carolina, compiled by the WeGOJA Foundation (on behalf of the SC African American Heritage Commission), is a first-of-its-kind travel guide to the most tourist-friendly destinations offering visitors avenues to discover intriguing African American history as they travel the state.
Organized by region and illustrated with more than 80 color photographs by Joshua Parks, this guidebook presents a curated selection of over 200 museums, monuments, historic markers, schools, churches, and other public lands. Features a foreword by Dr. Darlene Clark Hine, Distinguished Professor Emerita at Michigan State University where she served as the John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor of History. The South Carolina Green Book is a collaborative release by Hub City Press, the WeGOJA Foundation, and the International African American Museum. Sponsored by the City of Spartanburg.
FEATURES
One of the New Yorker's What We're Reading This Summer * A Millions Most Anticipated Book (June) * A Goop15 May 2020 Feature * One of Apartment Therapy's 7 Must-Read Books Everyone Will Be Talking About This Summer * One of Debutiful's 9 Books You Should Read This June * A Publishers Weekly Upcoming Indie Press Books feature * Winner of the 2024 Towson Prize for Literature
Hailed by Lauren Groff as fully committed to the truth no matter how dark or difficult or complicated it may be, and written with incantatory crispness, Sleepovers, the debut short story collection by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips.
This collection takes us to a forgotten corner of the rural South, full of cemeteries, soybean fields, fishing holes, and Duck Thru gas stations. We meet a runaway teen, a mattress salesman, feral kittens, an elderly bachelorette wearing a horsehair locket, and a little girl named after Shania Twain. Here, time and memory circle above Phillips' characters like vultures and angels, as they navigate the only landscape they've ever known. Corn reaches for rain, deer run blindly, and no matter how hungry or hurt, some forgotten hymn is always remembered. The literary love child of Carson McCullers and John the Baptist, Ashleigh Bryant Phillips' imagination is profoundly original and private, writes Rebecca Lee. Sleepovers marks the debut of a fearless new voice in fiction.
Sleepovers is the winner of the 2019 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, selected by Lauren Groff.