Hub City Press

Lolita Stewart-White's black frag/ments is a breathtaking series of narrative-lyric poems about the fragmentation of the Black body, family, and community facilitated by the historic and ongoing racism in the US healthcare system.

After her husband’s cancer diagnosis, Stewart-White finds herself haunted by the trauma Black Americans continue to face in medical settings. These poems, both brazen and tenderhearted, explore enduring love in the face of grief and hardship while drawing parallels to past injustices. Stewart-White expertly weaves ancestral and present voices together, resulting in an intergenerational archive that centers one family’s challenging journey in a broader context of how black people protest, repair, and revive.

When twelve-year-old Junah Simmons walks into his middle school classroom in September 1999, the chalkboard reads THE END OF THE WORLD IS HERE. 

In the months leading up to Y2K, Junah’s eccentric teacher tasks each of her students to make a time capsule in a shoe box to document their experiences in South Carolina at the end of the world.

Junah is an outsider at school, the kid in sunglasses with a speech impediment. Through the time capsule project, he sifts through the tough stuff: his parents divorce; Rusty, the school bully; Sadie, his punk crush who doesn’t know he exists; his mother’s pressure on him to turn to Jesus; his worry and loneliness. Rendered in vignettes and scraps, this kaleidoscopic novel follows Junah as he confronts the catastrophes of youth while wrestling with the notion that the world itself could end in December.

Funny, soulful, and timely, Dan Leach’s Junah at the End of the World reminds us that it’s only after accepting the world’s end that we can discover what it means to truly live. With the wit of George Singleton and the punk charm of Sam Pink, Dan Leach is a writer to watch.

Spanning more than half a century and cities from New Delhi to Atlanta, Anjali Enjeti’s debut is a heartfelt and human portrait of the long shadow of the Partition of India on the lives of three generations of women.

The story begins in August 1947. Unrest plagues the streets of New Delhi leading up to the birth of the Muslim majority nation of Pakistan, and the Hindu majority nation of India. Sixteen-year-old Deepa navigates the changing politics of her home, finding solace in messages of intricate origami from her secret boyfriend Amir. Soon Amir flees with his family to Pakistan and a tragedy forces Deepa to leave the subcontinent forever.

The story also begins sixty years later and half a world away, in Atlanta. While grieving both a pregnancy loss and the implosion of her marriage, Deepa’s granddaughter Shan begins the search for her estranged grandmother, a prickly woman who had little interest in knowing her. As she pieces together her family history shattered by the Partition, Shan discovers how little she actually knows about the women in her family and what they endured.

For readers of Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins, The Parted Earth follows Shan on her search for identity after loss uproots her life. Above all, it is a novel about families weathering the lasting violence of separation, and how it can often takes a lifetime to find unity and peace.

Finalist for the 2023 Weatherford Award in Poetry

Finalist for the 2023 ASLE Book Award in Creative Writing

In these haunting, layered poems, Lucien Darjeun Meadows affirms the interconnection of human and environmental identity.

“What can we do but seek nectar where it blooms,” whispers the porous and questioning speaker of In the Hands of the River.  With delicate precision, In the Hands of the River subverts traditional poetic forms to show how a childhood for a queer boy of both Cherokee and European heritage happens within and outside dominant narratives of Appalachia.This debut collection weaves ancestral and personal threads of trauma, reclamation, and survival into a multi-generational and multi-species tapestry that reaches from the distant stars visible in an Appalachian holler to the curl of a clover stem and the touch of the beloved, here and now. Moving across time, yet always grounded in place, these poems address the West Virginian landscape, both in exaltation and extraction, balanced with poems about the speaker's own body, and emergent sense of queer identity, as “a boy made of shards.”

Cleveland Sellers Jr. was the scapegoat for one of the bloodiest civil rights events of the 1960s.

In 1968 state troopers gunned down black students protesting the segregation of a South Carolina bowling alley, killing three and injuring 28. The Orangeburg Massacre was one of the most violent moments of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, and only one person served prison time in its aftermath: a young black man by the name of Cleveland Sellers Jr. Many years later, the state would recognize that Sellers was a scapegoat in that college campus tragedy and would issue a full pardon.

*Outside Agitator* is the story of a Sellers’ early activism: organizing a lunch counter sit-in as a 15-year-old in the tiny South Carolina town of Denmark, registering voters in Alabama and Mississippi, refusing the Vietnam War draft, serving as national program director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and working alongside 1960s civil rights icons Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King Jr., H. Rap Brown and Malcolm X. It's also the story of his lifelong struggle to overcome the Orangeburg incident and his slow crawl to justice. That journey takes him to Harvard University, then to a hard-fought position in civil service in Greensboro, North Carolina. And in a triumphant end to his career, a major Southern university elevates Sellers to chair its African-American Studies program, and the historically black college in his hometown respectfully calls him to be its president.

Adam Parker’s incisive biography is about a proud black man who refuses to be defeated, whose tumultuous life story personifies America’s continuing civil rights struggle.

A Debutiful Best Poetry Book of 2024
2025 North Carolina Book Awards: Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Award, Finalist

The Girl Who Became a Rabbit, is a book-length lyric, a dark, ruminative poem that pushes the limits of the prose-poetic form to explore how the body carries and shapes grief and what it means to tell a story.

Examining reclaimed narratives of embodiment, gentle hauntings, and fables of the body, Emilie Menzel approaches the body as a home we consciously build, spinning myths and fairytales as ways to rewrite the body’s history. 

In the spirit of Maggie Nelson and Max Porter, Menzel’s writing is wild, lush, recursive, and intentionally messy. A mesmerizing and unique debut, The Girl Who Became a Rabbit intersects fable and trauma, femininity and creatureliness, and imagines the transformation of the body, perhaps, into language.

One of 2020's most acclaimed books. Winner of the Southern Book Prize • Winner of the Weatherford Award • A Kirkus Best Fiction Book of 2020 • One of O Magazine’s Best LGBT Books of 2020 •  • One of the Women's National Book Association's 2020 Great Group Reads Selections • EW's 50 Most Anticipated Books of 2020 • BookRiot • Lambda Literary's • Salon • BookPage's • Garden & Gun's • Logo NewNowNext's

In this “brutally fresh kind of homecoming novel,” (Entertainment Weekly) Brian Jackson returns to his small Appalachian hometown and the family who rejected him. Carter Sickels’s stunning literary achievement “deserves a place in the canon of AIDS literature alongside the likes of Larry Kramer and Rebecca Makkai” (Los Angeles Review of Books).

The story of Brian’s return to small-town Ohio is told in a chorus of voices: Brian’s mother Sharon; his fourteen-year-old sister, Jess, as she grapples with her brother’s mysterious return; and the video diaries Brian makes to document his final summer. Written in prose that seeks “to answer without flinching away from ugliness and without demonizing the ignorant” (Salon), The Prettiest Star offers an urgent portrait of a family in the center of a national crisis, in order to tell a unique story about the politics and fragility of the body, and to explore the bounds of family and redemption.

We Imagined It Was Rain is the winner of our 2020 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize.

20th Anniversary Edition of this classic poetry collection, with a foreword by New York TImes Bestselling author, Robert Morgan and a new preface by the author.

First published in 1998, Eureka Mill is Ron Rash’s seminal collection of poetry. It introduced the world to an often overlooked Appalachian region and cemented Rash’s name as synonymous with Southern writing.

Eureka Mill presents a lyrical portrait of the migration of poor North Carolina farmers to Chester, South Carolina to work in the Eureka Cotton Mill in the years before the Great Depression. Drawing on his family history in the region that stretches back three hundred years, Rash assembles a nuanced tapestry of mill village life, from the foremen in their offices to the men and women at the looms toiling in the often inhumane conditions of the mills.

Rash’s poetry elevates the people and landscapes of rural Appalachia to incandescent heights, garnering comparisons to the work of Seamus Heaney and Robert Frost. Still one of Rash’s finest works to date, Eureka Mill is a vital record of one of the South’s most important historic shifts, offering readers at once intimacy and perspective, heart and understanding.

Duncan Park: Stories of a Classic American Ballpark recounts the history of Spartanburg's oldest wooden grandstand stadium. Built in 1926, Duncan Park stadium has been home to a semipro Negro Leagues team that had a star left-handed pitcher known throughout the South; a 1966 Spartanburg Phillies team named one of the 100 Best Minor League Baseball Teams; an American Legion Little World Series Champion; high school, college, and wooden bat-league summer teams; and legendary promotions and special events. Players and their families, coaches, sabermetricians, and all fans of America’s pastime will find in these pages a rich storehouse of our cultural heritage.

That's How It Works is a vibrant collection of fiction from Hub City Press’s first thirty years, showcasing the incredible talent nurtured by this community-driven literary press.

Featuring contributions from Hub City Press authors, past Writers-in-Residence, staff, and friends, the collection spans an impressive range of voices, styles, and stories. Set across the South and nation, they share a yearning for communication and connection.

Edited by Katherine Webb-Hehn and with an introduction by Hub City Press Publisher Meg Reid, That's How It Works is both a celebration of three decades of publishing from the margins and a testament to the transformative power of community in creating literature.

Winner of the 2020 Southern Book Prize
Indie Next Pick, April 2019
One of the Atlanta Journal Constitution's "South's 10 best books of 2019"
Finalist for the Townsend Prize Books All Georgians Should Read from the Georgia Center for the Book
One of the Wall Street Journal's Spring Picks for books
Okra Pick from the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance

In this gorgeously envisioned debut, set as the emergence of electricity and women’s desire for political, cultural, and sexual power electrified the country, a young woman’s rise to Vaudeville fame exposes secrets of her family’s past—and the keys to her own future. 

In rural north Georgia two decades after the Civil War, thirteen-year-old Lulu Hurst discovers an obscure book by legendary Mesmerist Henrietta Wolf on her father’s shelf. After Lulu uses Wolf’s wisdom to convince a cousin she can conduct electricity with her touch, her father sees an opportunity.

Her father’s lessons transform Lulu, once deemed gangly and indelicate, into an electrifying new woman: The Magnetic Girl, captivating enthusiastic crowds by lifting grown men in parlor chairs, throwing them across the stage with her “electrical charge.”  As her notoriety grows, Lulu harbors a secret belief that she can use the power of Mesmerism to heal her disabled baby brother, Leo, with whom she shares a profound and supernatural mental connection. To help him, she delves into the mysterious book’s pages, determined to harness Wolf’s teachings and convince herself, and the world, that her gifts are authentic. But will they be enough to heal her family?

Based on true events, this award-winning novel is a unique portrait of a forgotten period in history, seen through the story of one young woman’s power over her family, her community, and ultimately, herself.

For fans of Americana music and a beer after mowing the lawn, The Last Saturday in America confronts the long shadow of Southern masculinity.

The Last Saturday in America is set in a nation on the precipice of great change. Through examinations of suburban neighbors, bullies, gun violence, and vasectomy appointments, Ray McManus draws a portrait of American masculinity in the face of political division, pandemic, and cultural warfare. McManus’s speaker is caught between the way he was raised and the future he wants to see for who he is raising. He can no longer rely on what he thought he knew, nor does he know what to do about it. The man rendered in these pages is a father, a son, a Southerner. And he is willing to burn it all down and start something new, only to see that the new start he is looking for has been with him the whole time.

Reparations Now! asks for what’s owed.

In formal and non-traditional poems, award-winning poet Ashley M. Jones calls for long-overdue reparations to the Black descendants of enslaved people in the United States of America. In this, her third collection, Jones deftly takes on the worst of today—state-sanctioned violence, pandemic-induced crises, and white silence—all while uplifting Black joy. These poems explore trauma past and present, cultural and personal: the lynching of young, pregnant Mary Turner in 1918; the current white nationalist political movement; a case of infidelity. These poems, too, are a celebration of Black life and art: a beloved grandmother in rural Alabama, the music of James Brown and Al Green, and the soil where okra, pole beans, and collards thrive thanks to her father’s hands. 

By exploring the history of a nation where “Black oppression’s not happenstance; it’s the law,” Jones links past harm to modern heartache and prays for a peaceful world where one finds paradise in the garden in the afternoon with her family, together, safe, and worry-free.  While exploring the ways we navigate our relationships with ourselves and others, Jones holds us all accountable, asking us to see the truth, to make amends, to honor one another.

It’s 1939, and the federal government has sent USDA agent Virginia Furman into the North Carolina mountains to instruct families on modernizing their homes and farms. There she meets farm wife Irenie Lambey, who is immediately drawn to the lady agent’s self-possession. Already, cracks are emerging in Irenie’s fragile marriage to Brodis, an ex-logger turned fundamentalist preacher: She has taken to night ramblings through the woods to escape her husband’s bed, storing strange keepsakes in a mountain cavern. To Brodis, these are all the signs that Irenie—tiptoeing through the dark in her billowing white nightshirt—is practicing black magic.

When Irenie slips back into bed with a kind of supernatural stealth, Brodis senses that a certain evil has entered his life, linked to the lady agent, or perhaps to other, more sinister forces.

Working in the stylistic terrain of Amy Greene and Bonnie Jo Campbell, this award-winning debut by Julia Franks is the story of a woman intrigued by the possibility of change, escape, and reproductive choice—stalked by a Bible-haunted man who fears his government and stakes his integrity upon an older way of life. As Brodis chases his demons, he brings about a final act of violence that shakes the entire valley. In this spellbinding Southern story, Franks bares the myths and mysteries that modernity can’t quite dispel.

From editors David Joy and Eric Rickstad comes Gather at the River, an anthology of twenty-five remarkable essays on fishing from an ensemble of contemporary authors. Their experiences explore the ways we come to water, for renewal and reverie, or to simply stand waist-deep in a river and watch the trout rise.

Gather at The River is more than a collection of big fish stories; it’s Ron Rash writing about the Appalachia of his youth and C.J. Box revealing the river where he wants his ashes spread. It’s Natalie Baszile on a frogging expedition in the Louisiana Bayou and a teenaged Jill McCorkle facing new realities of adulthood on Holden Beach, North Carolina. This is an anthology about friendship, family, love and loss, and everything in between, because as Henry David Thoreau wrote, “it is not really the fish they are after.”

The contributors are an eclectic mix of critically acclaimed writers including New York Times Bestselling Authors Ron Rash, Jill McCorkle, Leigh Ann Henion, Eric Rickstad, M.O. Walsh, and #1 Bestseller C.J. Box.

Some of the proceeds of every sale will benefit C.A.S.T. for Kids, public charity that joins volunteers who love to fish with children who have special needs and disadvantages for a day of fishing in the outdoors.

A short story collection exploring the bounds of contemporary family and how we move forward in a world so often changed by loss.

Lauded by Kevin Wilson as “an exceptional collection that introduces us to an exciting new voice,” The Great American Everything orbits the experiences of relationships, be it brother-to-brother, sister-to-sister, patient-to-caregiver. Rendered with tenderness and a keen eye, these ten stories cut into the ways families approach questions of aging, adoption, loss, and class. A young woman hired to provide accompaniment services to an elder confronts the borders of complicity and friendship; two brothers search for details of their recently deceased grandfather in the desert; a college student faces her friend’s abuser during a door-to-door fundraising campaign.

Thirty stories, collected in one volume for the very first time, from one of the South's best known and most acclaimed short story writers.

With his signature darkly acerbic and sharp-witted humor, George Singleton has built a reputation as one of the most astute and wise observers of the South. Now Tom Franklin introduces this master of the form with a compilation of acclaimed and prize-winning short fiction spanning twenty years and eight collections, including stories originally published in outlets like the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Playboy, the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, and many more. A lovelorn and chatty euthanasia vet arrives at a couples’ house to put down their dog, Probate; a father-to-be searches his workplace—a bar—for a replacement sonogram after recording an episode of Bonanza over the original; an unlikely romance sparks between a librarian and a professional bowler while they compete to win an RV; a father takes his son to visit the many ex-girlfriends that could have been his mother.

Grady Hayes’s whole life revolves around football. When he breaks his leg starting a game against a rival high school, his life comes unglued. As he recovers, Grady grows bored and angry. He no longer relates to his mom, his cousin, or the girl he’s been talking to, and loses interest in catfishing and eating family suppers on the weekends. When Grady tries to return to the team, his spot has been filled, and there are rumors flying about why Coach made Grady a starting running-back in the first place.
Frustrated and alone, Grady falls in with Hambone, a brooding older classmate, who takes him deep into the swamps to hunt raccoons and experiment with drugs. After an ugly confrontation with another player in the locker room, his relationship with Hambone turns dark and violent. Out of options, Grady’s mom calls in his estranged father to set him straight, and Grady realizes that his dad isn’t the man he remembers.
In his debut novel, Robert Maynor delivers a literary Lowcountry Friday Night Lights that shines a harsh light on the ways American men are steeped in violence, and how hard it can be to shake loose the toxic norms that unchecked can keep us all so far apart.

Georgia Author of the Year, nominee
Amber Hollibaugh Award for LGBTQ+ Social Justice Writing, Finalist

In this powerful debut memoir, Neesha Powell-Ingabire chips away at coastal Georgia’s facade of beaches and golden marshes to recover undertold Black history alongside personal and family stories.

In May of 2020, Neesha Powell-Ingabire’s hometown became infamous after a viral video spread of white vigilantes killing a Black man named Ahmaud Arbery. The small coastal city of Brunswick, Georgia became synonymous with this tragedy, which, along with the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, spurred an international movement that summer to end white supremacy.

Neesha Powell-Ingabire, a millennial journalist, essayist, and organizer, grew up in Brunswick feeling alienated as a Black queer and disabled girl in a fraught racial and political environment. Come By Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia’s Geechee Coast traces the genealogy of systemic racial violence while paying homage to the area’s long history of Black resistance and culture keeping. Powell-Ingabire probes her personal connection to past and present: the victorious campaign to remove Brunswick’s Confederate monument out of a public park, modern echoes of ancestral practices such as farming, fishing, and basket weaving, the fight for Geechee land in Sapelo Island, and the mass suicide of the Igbo people, who drowned themselves in Dunbar Creek rather than be enslaved.

In Come By Here, Neesha Powell-Ingabire reckons with their home’s collective history and their own history as a truth-telling exercise in line with Audre Lorde’s advice: “It is better to speak.”

All Of Us Together In The End is a lyrical examination of transformation after loss, by a writer the New York Times calls "irresistible" and "utterly convincing."

Vollmer’s family memoir shimmers with wonder and enchantment and begins with the death of his mother from early-onset Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Soon after, flashing lights and floating orbs appear in the woods surrounding his family’s home in rural North Carolina, where his widowed father lives. Formative memories of having been raised in the Seventh-day Adventist church resurge in Vollmer’s mind, hastening self-reexamination and reckoning.

He corresponds with a retired geology professor about “ghost lights,” which supposedly occur more in North Carolina than any other American state. He scrolls TikTok. He contacts an eccentric shaman who lives in Spain to have transcendental psychotherapy administered over Zoom. And then Jolene emerges, a woman endeared for decades to Vollmer’s father, holding secrets to their family’s past.

Amidst the turmoil and loneliness of the pandemic, All of Us Together in the End is a poignant and often humorous investigation into belief set in a time where it seems people will believe anything. It is an elegiac affirmation of the awesome, strange, otherworldly ways our loved ones remain alive to us, even when they are out of reach.

With previous work hailed by the New York Times as “unflinching” and “piercing”, Ashley M. Jones’s Lullaby for the Grieving is her most personal collection to date.

In her fourth poetry collection, Jones studies the multifaceted nature of grief: the personal grief of losing her father, and the political grief tied to Black Southern identity. How does one find a path through the deep sorrow of losing a parent? What wonders of Blackness have to be suppressed to make way for "progress"?

Journeying through landscapes of Alabama, the Middle Passage and Underground Railroad, interior spaces of loss and love, and her father’s garden, Jones constructs both an elegy for her father and a celebration of the sacred exuberance and audacity of life. Featuring poems from her tenure as Alabama’s first Black and youngest Poet Laureate, Lullaby for the Grieving finds calm in unimaginable storms and attempts to listen for the sounds of healing.

In her dynamic debut, Halle Hill’s Good Women delves into the lives of twelve Black women across the Appalachian South. 

A Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2023 in Fiction • One of Oprah Daily's Best Books of the Year One of Electric Literature's Best Short Story Collections of 2023 • Featured in People Magazine's Best Books of Fall • One of the Boston Globe's 20 Books We’re Excited to Read This Fall • One of Kirkus's 20 Best Books To Read in September • Poets & Writer's "Page One" New and Noteworthy  • One of the Southwest Review's 10 Must Read Books of 2023 • Finalist for the 2024 Weatherford Award in Fiction • Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalist

"A stunning slow burn brimming with observation, emotion, and incident.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“A fantastic firecracker of a collection I'll return to again and again!” —Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

A woman boards a Greyhound bus barreling toward Florida to meet her sugar daddy’s mother; a state fair employee considers revenge on a local preacher; a sister struggles with guilt as she helps her brother plan to run away with a man he's seeing in secret; a young woman who works for a scam for-profit college navigates the lies she sells for a living. 

Darkly funny and deeply human, Good Women observes how place, blood-ties, generational trauma, obsession, and boundaries—or lack thereof—influence how we navigate our small worlds, and how those worlds so often collide in ways we don’t expect. Through intimate moments of personal choice, Hill carefully shines a light on how these twelve women shape and form themselves through faith and abandon, transgression and conformity, community, caution, and solitude.

With precision and empathy, Hill captures the mundane in moments of absurdity, and bears witness to both joy and heartbreak, reminding us how the next moment could be life-changing. Vibrant and exacting, Hill is a must-read new voice in literary fiction.

Czechoslovakia, 1939: Snow is falling over the city when the Nazis invade. Before the ice on the roads has a chance to melt, everything has changed for the country—and for Viktor Trn.

It isn’t obvious at first. The day-to-day realities of occupation take time to sink in. After losing his job as a history professor, Trn remains optimistic, preserving what little he can of his family’s dwindling freedom. In his family’s small apartment, the radio brings worsening news as Europe surrenders to Germany. Friends are arrested, men are hanged in the local school. Trn must protect his young son, but understands leaving their homeland could prove too dangerous.

Only when the air raids draw closer is Trn, a soft-spoken pacifist, pressured into making a choice: retreat to his decreasing sphere of familial safety, or join the resistance. Ultimately Trn finds himself caught between two titanic armies—the Nazis and the Soviets—and must decide how to save all that he loves.

In the spirit of Kristin Hannah's The Nightingale and Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, The Wooden King explores denial, desire, and family drama against the lyrically rendered backdrop of World War II, deftly navigating “the simple difference between what we do and what we ought to do” in the face of rising totalitarianism.

In 1994, the real Mid-South Ice Storm strikes the fictitious town of Bodock in Claygardner County, Mississippi. In the wake of the storm, what is left unbroken, and what broken things can be rebuilt? Hailed by Maurice Carlos Ruffin as “leaving no feeling untouched,” Robert Busby’s debut balances grit with heart, violence with depth, and tragedy with humor.

Two siblings survey the damage to their family’s orchard after the storm while their rich nephew circles in the hopes of buying up the property. A slacker divorcee drives his ex-father-in-law to his lung transplant surgery. A cop tries to piece his broken family back together in the wake of the loss of his son. In 1816, a farmer’s wife plots with an enslaved woman to stop her husband from committing a terrible act. And in a town that is not quite Bodock, a population of ghosts reckon with their unsettled pasts.In the spirit of Brad Watson’s Last Days of the Dog-Men, Bodock traverses time and dimensions to surface the struggles of the everyday.

Bodock: Stories is the winner of the 2024 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize.

In Long Eye, Kwoya Fagin Maples brings us a sea-bound collection that channels the mythic, defiant voice of a Black Mermaid.

Inspired by Mami Wata, a water spirit of Gullah Geechee folklore, Maples explores the power and divinity of being a Black woman, a mother, a thinker, a protector, and creator. The poems emerge from a neurodivergent mind navigating writing, parenthood, and the Atlantic waters of the South Carolina Lowcountry. The sea and its many creatures serve as guides—for survival, resistance, and transformation.

As she explores the intersection of science, poetry, and mythology, Maples also seeks to depict Black familial bonds in societies structured against them. Woven through the book is the voice of the mermaid, reminding us that “every underwater being exists in relation.”

At turns wonderstruck and irreverent, these poems pulse with human longing. Maples is a poet whose work is both musical and meticulous. Her eye somehow equally trained on the world at large and her own inner workings. The result is an astonishing, immersive experience.

When Jack Parker's father dies Jack knows one thing: Tom Parker was a good man. Beyond that, decades of distance and silence had kept the two men from truly knowing each other. Jack attends the funeral with the hope he can shovel some dirt onto Tom’s casket, collect a few commiserations, and put miles between himself and the questions he’d let simmer since he’d left home years before. But when a group of strangers appears at the funeral, Jack realizes he has more questions than answers about how his father actually lived his life.

Jack picks up the pieces, moving back home to help his ailing mother and continue work on his father’s many projects. He soon finds himself at the center of a family maelstrom, worsened by his troubled siblings’ lives and continued unearthings of Tom’s secrecy. Haunted by hazy nightmares from his youth and driven by guilt, Jack tries to uncover why his father kept such a considerable part of his life from them all. The secrets Jack uncovers might shake the foundation of the refuge he hopes to create.

Suddenly thrust into a dangerous world of drug deals and violence, Jack is forced to examine his own brutal limits and those of his father. When finally faced with the truth of his and Tom’s past, he realizes that sometimes secrets are best left buried on the river bottom.

A Wild Eden was the 2018 South Carolina Novel Prize winner, selected by Jill McCorkle.

From South Arts and Hub City Press comes an anthology containing selections of poetry from nine Southern states chosen for the 2025 Southern Prize & State Fellowships in Literary Arts that celebrate innovation in poetry.

Better Futures, Better Songs offers a vivid portrait of a South in transition—an anthology where craft meets courage and every page invites discovery. With striking imagination and technical mastery, these poets push the boundaries of form, voice, and emotion—merging narrative with innovation to craft verse that is both deeply resonant and refreshingly unexpected.Their poems balance wit and poignancy, risk, and refinement—offering a vision of Southern poetry that is as diverse and dynamic as the region itself.

This anthology features work from Meg Day, Julie Hensley, Ashley M. Jones, Aurielle Marie, Karisma Price, C.T. Salazar, Shakeema Smalls, Jessica Q. Stark, and Marcus Wicker.

From visual poetics to narrative invention, this collection celebrates the emotional depth and stylistic brilliance of a region's most vital literary voices. Explore the future of Southern poetry—one unforgettable voice at a time.

In 130 ink-and-watercolor drawings, the story of one year on a family farm in Kentucky unfolds in captured moments of daily life: Donahue chopping wood, a cow sniffing her head, her daughter tending to goats after a hard day at school. Each visual is paired with a written reflection on the day’s doings, interwoven with the longer-arc history of her family, the farm, and their community. In telling the story of a farm family’s struggle to survive and thrive, Landings grapples with the legacy of our cultural divide between art and land, and celebrates the beauty discovered along the way.

A New York Times Books New & Noteworthy book • A Most-Anticipated Book from BookPage, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Paperback Paris • Glowing reviews and features in Garden & Gun, CNN Philippines, Chapter16, Kirkus Reviews, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and more

This fierce collection celebrates the incredible diversity in the contemporary South by featuring essays by twenty-one of the finest young writers of color living and working in the region today, who all address a central question: Who is welcome?

Kiese Laymon navigates the racial politics of publishing while recording his audiobook in Mississippi. Regina Bradley moves to Indiana and grapples with a landscape devoid of her Southern cultural touchstones, like Popeyes and OutKast. Aruni Kashyap apartment hunts in Athens and encounters a minefield of invasive questions. Frederick McKindra delves into the particularly Southern history of Beyonce's black majorettes.

Assembled by editor and essayist Cinelle Barnes, essays in A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South acknowledge that from the DMV to the college basketball court to doctors’ offices, there are no shortage of places of tension in the American South. Urgent, necessary, funny, and poignant, these essays from new and established voices confront the complexities of the South's relationship with race, uncovering the particular difficulties and profound joys of being a Southerner in the 21st century.

A Debutiful Best Debut Book of 2025

why am i nostalgic for the shitty times in my life?

Reminiscent of being in a heavily postered room with rock music blasting, Cloud Delfina Cardona’s debut collection the past is a jean jacket is a time capsule of a 90s queer, Latinx teenhood. 

Cardona’s speaker explores their gender through sex and relationships, searches for belonging in their family lineage, and copes with depression using movies, indie bands, cigarettes, and Tumblr.

Featuring compelling visual collages and inventive imagery throughout, these poems are firmly rooted in Southern Texas. Cardona brings readers to a jukebox on S. LBJ Drive, underneath a Catholic girls high school, and to “San Marcos sunsets above the H-E-B parking lot” with weighted and poignant reflection. Each careful line produces a soundtrack to a passionate coming-of-age and implores us all to be gentle, yet honest, with our younger selves.

Evocative and blunt, the past is a jean jacket asks the essential existential questions: “where did all the wishes of my ancestors go? / what memory of me will play in someone’s head before i die for the final time?”

the past is a jean jacket was selected by Ashley M. Jones for the 2024 Hub City Press BIPOC Poetry Series.

In her debut collection, Tiana Nobile grapples with the history of transnational adoption, both her own from South Korea and the broader, collective experience. In conversation with psychologist Harry Harlow’s monkey experiments and utilizing fragments of a highly personal cache of documents from her own adoption, these poems explore dislocation, familial relationships, and the science of love and attachment.

A Rona Jaffe Foundation award winner, Nobile is a glimmering new talent. Cleave attempts to unknot the complexities of adoptee childhood, revealing a nature of opposites—”the child cleaved to her mother / the child cleaved from her mother”—while reckoning with the histories that make us.

Abstract
Foster Mother

The first time I belonged to a woman,
my body a fresh bulb broken off at the root.
She kept me for six months,
watched spit bubble from my pursed lips.

I wonder if she ever claimed me,
if she rocked me to sleep on her chest,
if she wiped my mouth gently saying,
There you go, there you are.

A collection of fiction and graphic ephemera, Little Ones plays in a space of shadows and in-betweens.

Informed by Appalachian experience and traditions of Southern storytelling, these award-winning stories are populated by the world’s dispossessed, disturbed, and disregarded: the quiet interior life of a passed-over laborer, the bedtime story a goose tells a snake about a boy named Grey, moments of a road-killed raccoon's afterlife, advice to the children of a future apocalypse.

These mischievous polyvocal tales are an exercise in audacity, in embracing the bizarre and carnivalesque within us. Grey Wolfe LaJoie employs uncanny wit and deep empathy to explore the way shame can turn into desperate violence, and to shed light on the smallest among us.

One of the New Yorker's "What We're Reading This Summer" * A Millions Most Anticipated Book (June) * A Goop15 May 2020 Feature * One of Apartment Therapy's "7 Must-Read Books Everyone Will Be Talking About This Summer" * One of Debutiful's "9 Books You Should Read This June" * A Publishers Weekly "Upcoming Indie Press Books" feature * Winner of the 2024 Towson Prize for Literature

Hailed by Lauren Groff as “fully committed to the truth no matter how dark or difficult or complicated it may be,” and written with “incantatory crispness,” Sleepovers, the debut short story collection by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips.

This collection takes us to a forgotten corner of the rural South, full of cemeteries, soybean fields, fishing holes, and Duck Thru gas stations. We meet a runaway teen, a mattress salesman, feral kittens, an elderly bachelorette wearing a horsehair locket, and a little girl named after Shania Twain. Here, time and memory circle above Phillips’ characters like vultures and angels, as they navigate the only landscape they’ve ever known. Corn reaches for rain, deer run blindly, and no matter how hungry or hurt, some forgotten hymn is always remembered. “The literary love child of Carson McCullers and John the Baptist, Ashleigh Bryant Phillips’ imagination is profoundly original and private," writes Rebecca Lee. Sleepovers marks the debut of a fearless new voice in fiction.

Sleepovers is the winner of the 2019 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, selected by Lauren Groff.

In her award-winning debut collection, Emily W. Pease is at work redefining the short story. Let Me Out Here explores the underbellies and strange desires of our neighbors, our loved ones, ourselves.

A co-ed takes up/leaves school with a mysterious cab driver who’s been calling every night on her dormitory’s hall phone; a family isolated by their faith hikes to a waterfall in search of healing; a mother sets her balcony on fire after an awkward family dinner; a woman befriends the snakes her preacher boyfriend keeps in their shed. This revealing collection offers a deep empathy for people doing the best they can, despite themselves.

Spread over varied landscapes of the South and offering surprising moments of raw revelation, the characters here find themselves at crossroads or alone on an empty street at night. With Let Me Out Here, Pease joins the ranks of Mary Gaitskill, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Kelly Link, and adds to their tradition a deft, singular style and a voice as darkly funny as it is exacting.

Let Me Out Here is the 2018 winner of the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize.

Set along the U.S.-Mexico border, Dusk & Dust introduces the voice of a “boy straddled on the valley of two geographies.” With a keen eye, gentle humor, and great empathy, Esteban Rodríguez’s debut collection explores the lives of the generations who have made their homes in a landscape too often neglected and forgotten. Like the region they portray—relentless, unsympathetic, singed with uncertainty—these poems are marked with a visceral beauty. The aroma of cattle mingles with steaming tamales, and carnival organs play behind telenovelas in this richly conjured and mercurial world. Through the eyes of his luchador mask, with a foot planted firmly on either side of the fence, the young speaker grapples with a host of cultural and familial expectations, a tenuous grasp on his family’s language, and his own burgeoning identity. Funny and poignant, Dusk & Dust lays out a labyrinth of cultural expectations, and, with a voice as clear as it is unique, illuminates a world that seeks to be remembered and lived.

LA PULGA

Sunday morning strolls along the frontage road 

like a censer-swinging priest, scrapes its sunlight 

against the corroded chain-link fence, between 

the lines of traffic overflowing from the entrance, 

where I already taste the scent of wet cilantro, 

grilled onions, mixed meat, and eggs sizzled in a haze 

of dust-shuffled heat; in a blanket of black exhaust 

crawling across the pot-hole-riddled parking lot, 

and through the rows of sunburned cars nudging 

each other like buzzards on a corpse they’ve yet 

to eat. I endure my grandfather’s crooked parking, 

the constant honking, the backseat acoustics of thin 

music sprinkled in the air, those far-off plastic 

speakers blaring songs with unpredictable trumpets, 

and Spanish gritos slapped against my English-only ears….

The Columbia space shuttle and its contents rain down on the people of Kiser, Texas, in Kathryn Schwille’s imaginative debut novel set six weeks before the invasion of Iraq.

In a chorus of voices spanning places and years, What Luck, This Life explores the Columbia disaster’s surprising fallout for a town beset by the tensions of class, race, and missed opportunity. Evoking Sherwood Anderson’s classic Winesburg, Ohio and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, the novel’s unforgettable characters struggle with family upheaval and mortality’s grip and a luminous book emerges—filled with heartache, beauty and warmth.

A remarkable debut collection about identical twin sisters and their parents’ struggle with addiction

"I am busy seeing," declares the reverent and ever-curious speaker of Mustard, Milk, and Gin. In this haunting debut, Megan Denton Ray unflinchingly sifts through the sediment of a girlhood ruled by service. Everything in these poems sweats—the sunflower working hard for its first pair of leaves, the sister feeding her twin like a father, the men and women working in a community ravaged by the opioid crisis. With tender restraint, Ray's poems question the infallibility of devoutness while finding solace in the classification of the natural world. What results is a powerhouse voice that chooses preservation above all else. No poppy, wild carrot, or honeycomb is too small a treasure as Ray weaves stories of loss and mercy through both dreamscapes and domestic scenes alike. The forgettable and forgotten ignite—these poems are gifts of curiosity and care. Mustard, Milk and Gin is the winner of the 2019 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize as selected by G.C. Waldrep.

Marlanda Dekine’s debut collection is a holy, radical unlearning and reclamation of self. What does it mean to be a Gullah-Geechee descendant from a rural place where a third of the nation’s founding wealth was harvested by trafficked West and Central Africans? Dekine’s poems travel across age and time, signaling that both the past and future exist in the present. Through erasure and persona, Dekine reimagines intergenerational traumas and calls institutions from the Works Progress Administration narratives to modern-day museums to task.

Beyond gospel music, fear, and the stories of generations past, Thresh & Hold offers magic, healing, and innovative pathways to manifest intimacy. Dekine remembers, remakes, and brings forth their many selves, traveling far in order to deeply connect to a spiritual home within and all around them, calling: “I am listening to Spirit. I am not dying today.” 

Marlanda Dekine is the winner of the 2021 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize.

Texas Institute of Letters Award finalist for Best First Book of Poetry

In El Rey of Gold Teeth, Reyes Ramirez explores living in America as a first-generation American of Salvadoran and Mexican descent, living among conflicting histories.

Through the voices of an astronaut, a tennis player, a drag queen, family members, an alternate version of the self, and even a turtle, these propulsive poems embody the many marginalized voices demanding to be remembered in a nation that requires erasure of histories.

Colonizing languages and subverting forms, rerouting histories, and finding the mundane made extraordinary, El Rey of Gold Teeth breaks open notions of destiny, in humorous and devastating ways, to reimagine the past and present a new future where lack transforms to abundance, where there will be many answers to every question. Reyes Ramirez’s debut poetry collection plays in spaces of both elegy and joy, and introduces a vibrant new talent.