The Dispossessions of Appalachia: A Review of Ramp Hollow
Review The yeoman farmer is a central figure in debates over the historical dispossessions that created the place we now call Appalachia. For historians like Ron Eller, these self-sufficient small...
The Joneses: Home Made in Mississippi
Interview Southern Spaces: How did you begin the project that became this remarkable documentary The Joneses? https://vimeo.com/390791326 The Joneses Trailer. Bunny Lake Films LLC, 2016. John Howard: Jheri (at the...
Nowhere [yet Everywhere] in the World: Cuban History and Sexuality in the Dramas of Abel González Melo
Introduction Playwright Abel González Melo was born in 1980 in Havana, Cuba, the year the Mariel Boatlift saw approximately 125,000 people flee his country, an event he dramatizes in his...
"Beer, Prayer and Nellydrama": (Im)Possibilities in Max Vernon's The View UpStairs
I. Introduction Max Vernon, New York, 2018. Photograph by Roberto Araujo. Courtesy of Max Vernon. In February 2017, playwright and composer Max Vernon debuted their first Off-Broadway musical The View...
Writing Appalachia
Excerpt Looking over the end of the Turtle Creek Valley where it flows into the Monongahela River next to Edgar Thomson Steelworks, Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania, March 11, 2016. Photograph by...
1108 Dynamite Hill
Video https://player.vimeo.com/video/652096254?h=527be50265& Essay Jeff Drew, born in 1951, is a lifelong resident of Birmingham, Alabama's North Smithfield neighborhood. In 2013, following the fiftieth anniversary commemoration of the Birmingham campaign of...
Reckoning with Enslavement
Excerpt Georgetown, April 2017 It was early morning when I crossed the Francis Scott Key Bridge from Virginia into Georgetown. College spires loomed in the distance, gray in the dawn...
Memphis by Hand: Creative Small-Business Advertising
Photo Essay Map of Memphis Neighborhoods (Base Map Data: US Census Bureau) Photographer's Statement While I didn't seek out hand-painted signs, I noticed their emergence as a pattern in my...
Burning bright, Tysons Corner, Virginia, 2009
A Mess of Poke
Essay If some of y’all never been down South too much, I’m gonna tell you a little bit about this, so that you’ll understand what I’m talking about Down there...