Okraaz

New South, New Stories: The Southern Writers Tearing Up the Old Playbook

For too long, Southern literature meant a narrow set of images — crumbling plantations, drawling white protagonists, and a romanticized grief for a world that never deserved romanticizing in the first place. A new generation of writers from across the South is done with all that. They're writing the region as it actually is: complicated, diverse, spiritually rich, and very much alive. And the literary world is finally paying attention.