Salvation South Readings

Letting a stranger go first at Home Depot seemed like a good deed. Fifteen minutes later, Diana Keough was reckoning with what she had quietly wanted in return. Diana Keough writes the monthly "Between Sundays" column for Salvation South . She is an award-winning journalist and professor of journalism at the University of Georgia. She is the creator of Not From a Nice Family , a memoir podcast tha...

An essay by Salvation South editor Chuck Reece that isn’t a note about which party won the 2026 midterm elections. It’s about a question first asked in the Georgia House in 1868, the people who kept asking it for generations, and a victory speech that reached back to the oldest lesson of all.

Ahead of election day, Kari Gunter-Seymour answers the candidates who mistake Appalachia for easy prey. Kari Gunter-Seymour is the immediate past Poet Laureate of Ohio and recipient of an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, IPPY Bronze Award, NYC Big Book Award, a National Federation of Press Women Award and Feathered Quill Award. She is the executive director of the Women of Appalachia...

Hear South Carolina's Pee Dee Region Poet Laureate read her compositions "The Ghost in My Bedroom" and "Dead Lover Dream." Jo Angela Edwins has published poems in over 100 journals and anthologies. She is author of the collection A Dangerous Heaven (2023) and the chapbooks Play (2016) and Bitten (2025). She has received awards from Winning Writers, Poetry Super Highway, the Jasper Project, and the...

Born, raised and bent double as a hairpin in various versions of Small-Town Baptist USA, Jane Dorn is currently at work on her chapbook, South of Tarnation. She lives in South Carolina where, inspired by Woody Guthrie, she keeps her hoping machine running.

Excerpted from Bains's debut collection, Work Lunch. Lee Bains is a poet and songwriter from Birmingham, Alabama. A cult songwriter forged in independent scenes, his work has carried him all over the U.S. and Europe, has received acclaim from the likes of Rolling Stone , The New York Times , NPR, The New Yorker , and The Guardian , and has led him to be a supporting musician for other artists like...

Among old tires and burn barrels, a poet searches for the folks who left spare parts of themselves behind. Samantha Renee Ratcliffe (she/they) is a queer Appalachian poet and songwriter from Kentucky. A recent graduate of the University of Kentucky MFA program, their work centers queerness and rurality. Their poems are featured or forthcoming in YNST, Queer Kentucky, Susurrus Magazine, Pine Mounta...

From a painted lawn ornament to a boxing ring strung with clothesline, Bill Brymer watches what a neighborhood teaches. Brymer reads his poems “Lawn Jockey," "Boxing," "Believers," and "Mucking." Bill Brymer is a writer and photographer from Louisville, Kentucky. A Pushcart-nominated poet, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Louisville Review , Prairie Schooner, Sheila-Na-Gig Online , T...

Excerpted from The Red Ahead , the new collection from Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr., these five poems treat a Mothman sighting the way a preacher treats a vision: as something that demands a response. Hear Willie Carver read "Chirp," “Cubist Cryptid,” "Mothman Wants," "Unknown Name. 1867.," and "Family Cookout Omen, 1988." Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr. is advocate, educator, author, and forme...

Dad smokes in his chair while Mayberry glows through the evening haze. Hear Gene Hyde read his poem “Cigar Boxes.” Gene Hyde’s poetry, essays, and photography have appeared in such publications as Appalachian Journal, The Banyan Review, Raven’s Perch , Tiny Seed Literary Journal, and Mountains Piled Upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene . He lives in the Blue Ridge Mountai...

Rain beats the holler while a record spins inside a guarded house. Hear Ariadne Alexis Macquarie read their poems “Some Definitions of Rain” and “No Contact.” Ariadne Alexis Macquarie (she/they), a writer, environmental conservationist, and assistant editor of the Best of the Net Anthology , lives in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds an MFA from the University of Kentucky and a BA from Roanoke...

“Bless her heart” isn't always a blessing. Claire Coenen is a writer and facilitator living in Nashville, Tennessee, where she directs Sophia’s Center for the Healing Arts , a gathering place dedicated to nurturing wisdom of the heart through creative expression in community. Claire’s writing appears in a variety of online and print publications. Her first collection of poems, The Beautiful Keeps...

The moped is in a ditch out by Church Street. How it got there matters less to him than what he's building back home in the shed. Andrew Kerbs lives and writes in the Appalachian foothills of east Tennessee with his partner Ashley and oversized sled dog Cooper. Having lived much of his life in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky, he writes about the South, Appalachia, and the folks who call it...

Read this piece at Salvation South : “ Dear Ellen ” For twelve years, Diana Keough’s friend Ellen walked the path love asked of her, teaching those who watched what courage, friendship, and faith look like when a heart is breaking. Diana Keough is an award-winning journalist and professor of journalism at the University of Georgia. She is the creator of Not From a Nice Family , a memoir podcast th...

Read these poems at Salvation South : “A Skulk of Jennifers.” Jennifer Griffith writes with dark wit about the small arrangements — of names, clothes, and last requests — that shape a life. Griffith is an Athens, Georgia poet, who earned her B.A., M.A., and Ph. D. at the University of Georgia and now teaches there in the Department of Advertising and Public Relations. Currently, Jennifer’s muses a...

Read this poem at Salvation South : “ Heaven Is .” A daughter’s offerings to her mother, from a Blount County corner store . Halle Hill is the author of Good Women: Stories (Hub City Press, 2023). Her short fiction, essays, and poems have been published in Granta, Joyland , New Limestone Review , Southwest Review , Atlanta Magazine , and Oxford American , among others, and this is her first publis...

Read these poems by KB Ballentine at Salvation South : “ Thunder Argues With the Heat .” Originally published September 30, 2025. Chattanooga, Tennessee, poet KB Ballentine reads two new works: “Late August” and “Stop the Moment.” KB Ballentine began writing poetry so she could better understand how to teach it to her high school students. Since then she has been drawn to the light and spirit of p...

Read these poems by Kari Gunter-Seymour at Salvation South : “ The Twangs I Speak, the Myths I Favor .” Originally published September 30, 2026.. The former Ohio Poet Laureate reads four new poems: “Meditation on the Transition of All Things Into Memory,” “All of This and Little Else,” “The Nuts (And Bolts) of Self-Reflection,” and “When Honky-Tonk Boys Return Home From College After Their First S...

Salvation South editor Chuck Reece reflects on the life of the late Dolly Parton.

Tennessee poet Chris Wood reads four new works: "Sitting in the Grandstand,” “The Choir of Summer," “Broken Edge of Summer," and “After the Funeral.” A Kentucky native now living in Tennessee, Chris Wood is the author of the chapbook Yesterday Echoes , and her work appears in several publications, including January House Literary Journal , Heart of Flesh , and Women Speak: Volume Ten (Women of App...

A poem by New Orleans writer Christopher Louis Romaguera: from a grandfather’s Havana to the riptide of Miami to New Orleans, one family keeps learning the arithmetic of leaving. Born in Hialeah, Florida, and a graduate of Florida International University in Miami and the University of New Orleans, Christopher Louis Romaguera is a Cuban-American writer living in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is a VON...

A poet uses a child’s paintbrush to coax a single, fist-sized lemon from an indoor tree. Hear Ilyse Simon read her poem “The Tender.” Ilyse Simon saw the total eclipse in 2024 and began to write on the back of a crumpled napkin while stuck in traffic. She lived in Virginia for over a decade, where she created the Happy Belly Deli and managed the Roanoke Natural Foods Co-Op. Now, she is a nutrition...

What a family says, and cannot say, when it lays down one of its own. Hear Samuel Collins Hicks read his poem “A Farmer’s Funeral.” Samuel Collins Hicks is a journalist, actor, and cat lover in Lexington, Kentucky. He is a mental-illness and alcohol-recovery advocate, who lives with Bipolar II disorder and is celebrating five years of sobriety.

A neighbor called the city on their April-in-Mississippi yard. They suspected a vendetta, either political or apian. Kendall Dunkelberg directs the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Mississippi University for Women, where he also directs the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium and edits Poetry South magazine. He has published four collections of poetry: Landscapes and Architectures , Time Capsu...

Three poems from Julie Hensley’s Bent Cedar Mountain , where coal country’s debts come due in parking lots and Easter kitchens. Julie Hensley is a core faculty member of the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University, where she teaches both fiction and poetry. She is the author of several books, including Viable , Landfall: A Ring of Stories , Five Oaks , and Bent Cedar Mountain . Sou...