The memoir Nola Face, by Brooke Champagne, is a celebration of intersectionality. Despite the subtitle of “A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy,” Champagne parades through the multiple masks she and her city of New Orleans wear, while tossing her insights and insecurities at readers like so many trinkets. Memoirs are vulnerable and intimate. But few have the distinct flavor of this one – ya heard me? Champagne wastes no time acquainting readers with her origin story by introducing us to Lala, her grandmother. In some ways, Lala created Champagne’s quad-culturalism: American, New Orleanian, Ecuadori ..read more

When Monica Brashears’s debut novel, House of Cotton, released in April 2023, it was described as a “bizarre, uncomfortable read in the best way possible” (NPR) and “meditates on moral dilemmas in fresh, haunting ways” (NYT). The novel follows Magnolia Brown, a young Black woman in Knoxville, Tennessee, who – while grieving her grandmother’s recent passing, working a low token job at a gas station, and fending off a predatory landlord in more ways than one – accepts a lucrative position with an enigmatic and visionary funeral home owner named Cotton. The job entails modeling and “inhabiting” t ..read more

I‘m reading as much as I can these days between sneezes (whew, the pollen this year!), especially poetry! If you’d like to celebrate National Poetry Month with a brand new collection, check out these new Southern titles — plus some nonfiction written by beloved poets. a little bump in the earth By Tyree Daye April 2, 2024 Copper Canyon: “Tyree Daye’s a little bump in the earth is an act of invention and remembrance. Through sprawling poems, the town of Youngsville, North Carolina, where Daye’s family has lived for the last 200 years, is reclaimed as ‘Ritual House.’ a little bump in ..read more

Photo credit: Gabrielle Bates Considering Rachel Edelman for this series, I wondered how a book might be “Southern” when written outside of the geographical region, for instance, Edelman’s Pacific Northwest, which feels about as far from the gulf coastal plain region of Memphis, Tennessee, as you can get, let alone further east in Tennessee where I am. The many ways that identity might be rooted in or uprooted from region have inspired Dear Memphis, her collection of poems published by River River Books in January. Unpacking that experience as a reader has been the joy of the book for me. Dear ..read more

Narrated in the first person, Stealing by Margaret Verble is an astute delivery of the plight Indigenous American children were forced into in the 1950s. As a descendant of the Cherokee nation, Verble offers a complex and descriptive view into the pain, confusion, abuse, and upheaval these children faced, and does so from the relatable point of view of a young girl in the thick of it. Karen “Kit” Crockett is growing up in the 1950s South and has seen her share of tragedies. Her mother, a member of the Cherokee Nation whose people survived the Trail of Tears, died of tubercu ..read more

Victimhood is a complex subject, one with the capacity to instill empathy and create connection to the misfortunes of others, though sometimes accompanied by the stigma of helplessness. As Andrew Boryga’s novel Victim shows, it is a liability that can damage a life but can also be reclaimed as an asset to be unjustly exploited.  Victim is the story of Javier Perez, a young Puerto Rican man and aspiring writer from an unnamed rough-and-tumble neighborhood in the Bronx. At the beginning of the novel, we see twelve-year-old Javi on a visit to Puerto Rico, watching his drug dea ..read more

Rahul Mehta’s Feeding the Ghosts is a reflective and at times melancholic collection that offers a fresh perspective on how to maintain identity in the shadows of family and discrimination. The poems are honest, heartfelt, and easily accessible. Fans of Rahul Mehta’s previous novel and short story collection will appreciate the often conversational and prose-like nature of these poems. However, the importance of this collection lies in the voice it gives to the intersectionality of a gender nonconforming Indian American raised in West Virginia. In these deeply personal poems, Mehta manages to ..read more

The longstanding trend of defining masculinity as an emblem of stoicism and strength has led to suggestions that maybe men aren’t alright. Ray McManus enters this conversation with his fourth book of poetry, The Last Saturday in America, opening the wounds embedded in the expectations of being a man and examining how those expectations converge with the culture of the rural American South.  A Southerner himself, McManus approaches this collection from the view of someone both steeped in and appreciative of the region’s cultural touchpoints, while at the same time confronting a realization ..read more

“Do you want to know how to time travel?” asks the narrator’s tía in the opening short story in Daniel Chacón’s new collection, The Last Philosopher in Texas: Fictions and Superstitions. Equal parts surreal and sharp, devastating and delightful, The Last Philosopher in Texas has something for everyone. From a time-traveling aunt, who may or may not carry a message from the narrator’s deceased mother, to a man driving through the Starbucks line where Jesus takes his order, a skinny chai latte with two extra shots of espresso, Chacón pulls readers into one world after another, melding realty wit ..read more

Raised in a conservative religious community that sought healing through prayer instead of medicine, Anna Gazmarian found her faith at odds with science when she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2011. In Devout: A Memoir of Doubt, she revisits the decade following her diagnosis, during which she struggled to reconcile the teachings of her childhood – and the religious trauma that accompanied them – with her dark, painful road to healing. With a unique voice that artfully infuses humor with suffering and yields a message of hope, Gazmarian peels back the curtain of guilt and shame that to ..read more