With contributions from Cynthia Greenlee, Crystal Wilkinson, Channing Gerard Joseph, and many others, this special edition is really something to savor. Alice Randall, the New York Times best-selling novelist, award-winning songwriter, educator, food activist, and cookbook author, guest edits the issue, one that centers, “the Southern kitchen in the African diaspora, and in conversation with other arts—for in the African-American experience cooking in the South has long been both an expressive and global practice.”
Editor’s Letter: Food Is Us, by Alice Randall
COVID Kitchen, by Crystal Wilkinson
The Umstead, by Julia Bainbridge
Pimento-cracy, by Cynthia R. Greenlee
The Art of Being Eaten Alive, by Channing Gerard Joseph
A Monumental Flavor, by Lokelani Alabanza
After Apple Picking, by Mark Powell
Promise and Purpose, by Amanda Little
A Sustainable Call and Response, a poem by Caroline Randall Williams
A Weary Traveler in a Familiar Land, by Psyche Williams-Forson
Nothing Can Dim the Light, by Donna Battle Pierce
Sisterfeast and the Manna of Afro-Carolina, by Michelle Lanier with Kali Grosvenor
FEATURES
PEASANT FOOD
Notes from a life in restaurants
by Brad Johnson
TARRY WITH ME
Reclaiming sweetness in an anti-Black world
by Ashanté M. Reese
SIX POEMS
by Tarfia Faizullah
FLASHLIGHT
A story by J. Shores-Argüello
Loving Something Enough, by Tiana Clark
Sweet Potato Pie, a story by Eugenia Collier
Nothing but Sweet Potato Pie, by Ayana Contreras
No Charge, by Tandy Wilson
Sweet Potato Chess and Meringue Jar-Lid Pies,
by Rebekah Turshen
Art by
Frank Frances, Jan Groover, Geoffrey Ellis, Jimmy James Greene, Caroline Randall Williams, Aarón Ramos, Najee Dorsey, Katrina d’Autremont, Carter/Reddy, Chandra McCormick, Danny Ghitis, Sharon Core, Xaviera Simmons, Jasmine Clarke, Celestia Morgan, Louis Fratino, Coreen Simpson, Jen Everett, Didier William, Yasmin Reshamwala, Sara Fox, Manik Raj Nakra, Hally Erickson, Milton Carter, Greg Breda, Marc Padeu, Alysia Macaulay
Cover: Photograph by Frank Frances, from the series Remember the South. Monograph available through Monolith Editions