Two Gun and Trey and Me
August 2019By Matthew Hansen The man in the white cowboy hat knew the jig was up the day he entered a Chicago courtroom, placed his hand on the Bible and swore to tell the whole truth. Richard Hart wasn’t on trial that day in September 1951. The prosecution had called him to the stand as […]
Shifting the Southern Narrative, or Why I Came Home
June 2019Confronting the difficult truths of a changing Southern landscape. By Lyndsey Gilpin In the faded photo, my grandmother is 14 years old, huddled close to her best friend on a wooden fence somewhere in Eastern Kentucky. She’s wearing a sweater and rolled-up jeans, the humidity frizzing her chestnut-brown hair
We Are All From Somewhere Else
May 2019(Or How I Ended Up in Chadron, Nebraska of all Places)
Editor's Picks
In late August 2016, about five minutes from my house, Kenneth Walker, the only black volunteer firefighter in North Tonawanda, New York, received a racist threat in the mail. It read: NIGGERS ARE NOT ALLOWED TO BE FIREFIGHTERS. NO ONE WANTS YOU IN THIS CITY. YOU HAVE UNTIL THE END OF THE WEEK TO RESIGN […]
Place and Change in Eastern Ohio
On the Frontiers of Change
“Where are we?” says one sailor. “I’m not sure. Do we even know where we’re going?” replies the other. They share looks of consternation and confusion, a moment of despair. Then they pull out their log books and their compasses. They calculate their place in the world, which way they’re headed and how far […]
Post-election outcomes in rural Pennsylvania
This story first appeared in Moyers and Company, March 10, 2017, and is republished with permission. A lot of people don’t believe me when I tell them Letcher County, Kentucky, is one of the most open-minded places I’ve ever lived. I might not have believed it either, before I moved here a year ago. I’ve […]
Life after Incarceration
The town of Portsmouth, Ohio, has been called the “pill mill of America” and has signified ground zero of the opioid epidemic for many. The Portsmouth Stealth, a semi-pro football team, and one that is community-minded, is telling a different story about their town. They play in Spartan Stadium, once home to one of the original […]
As a child in South Carolina, my nightly ritual was to go into my parents’ room and tell them goodnight. They would usually be reading in bed, the television on low, waiting for the late news on WIS-TV. As I got older this became rather perfunctory—sometimes I’d just peek my head through the doorframe […]
Morgan asks to meet with me after class to discuss the upcoming paper assignment. We just finished reading a 1960s lesbian pulp novel in “Introduction to LGBT Studies” and the assignment in question is a creative one with 3 choices: either retell a scene from the book in a contemporary context with contemporary dialogue, tell […]