About storySouth

Our mission

See that pretty painting to the right? It’s so southern. Stick those flowers in a vase and you can almost taste the genteel old ladies sipping mint juleps on their antebellum back porches.

But truth: that ain’t the south today. And those flowers—they’re kudzu blooms. Just like kudzu, the 21st century south is a mix of traditional and new, regional and international. And even though kudzu is unfairly dismissed as a weed, it has a vitality and ability which far surpasses that of most plants native to America.

storySouth’s most important mission is to showcase the best fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry that writers from the new south have to offer. Special emphasis is given to finding and promoting the works of promising new writers.

In addition, storySouth aims to prove that the internet is not just a medium of flash and style; that excellent writing can attract attention without programming gimmicks and hard-to-read fonts. To this end, storySouth practices clean, simple web design.

And what storySouth is doing must be working, because over the last six years our magazine has been recognized for its unique look at southern writing. Stories, essays, and poetry published in storySouth have won a number of awards and have been reprinted in anthologies such as Best American Poetry 2008, Best of the Web 2008, and e2ink: The Best of the Online Journals. storySouth also runs the annual Million Writers Award, which honors the best online fiction of the year and was named a Hot Site by USA Today. To read about these honors and more, check out storySouth’s award-winning writings page.

Online fads can’t help but fade away; great writing endures. storySouth is all about the writing.

Staff

Editor TERRY KENNEDY is the Associate Director of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at UNC Greensboro and Founding Editor of Spring Garden Press. His work appears in variety of journals and magazines including Cave Wall, from the Fishouse, roger: an art & literary magazine, and The Southern Review.
Assistant Editor ANDREW SAULTERS is a lecturer in the English Department at UNC Greensboro. Despite having what his father calls a “big city accent,” he’s from Phenix City, AL.
Fiction Editor DREW PERRY has published work in Atlanta Magazine, Black Warrior Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Nebraska Review, Willow Springs, and New Stories from the South, among other places. He teaches in the undergraduate creative writing program at Elon University. His novel, This Is Just Exactly Like You, is forthcoming in 2010 from Viking Penguin.
Poetry Editor JULIE FUNDERBURK is a native North Carolinian. Her poems appear in literary magazines such as Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, Smartish Pace, 32 Poems, and roger: an art & literary magazine. Her work is included in the anthology Best New Poets and has appeared on the Web site Verse Daily. She has been a Howard Nemerov Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and teaches at Queens University of Charlotte in NC.
Creative Nonfiction Editor CYNTHIA NEARMAN has been the Writing Director at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC, since 2004. She teaches first-year writing, creative nonfiction, travel writing, rhetoric & composition, and contemporary American literature. As a writer she works in various genres--academic scholarship, cultural commentary, and personal essays--focusing mostly on things like literacy, racism, and love. Her husband is a magician, and they live in a happy little cottage with their two yellow dogs & one bossy cat.
Associate Poetry Editor MARTIN ARNOLD teaches in the English Department at Guilford College. His poetry has been published in Crazyhorse, Poetry East, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. Sometimes he has something funny to say.
Assistant Creative Nonfiction Editor KATHRYN WALKER’s family has been in North Carolina for a couple hundred years. She lives in her hometown of Greensboro, NC, with her husband and two dogs and two cats. In addition to writing things, she likes to read, listen to music, and make cards out of trash.

Assistant Fiction Editors

MATT FIANDER is a graduate of the MFA program at UNC Greensboro, where he served as the assistant fiction editor for The Greensboro Review. He is a fiction writer, and has had work appear in The Yalobusha Review. He is also a music critic for PopMatters, and a contributor to Prefix Magazine. He currently lives in Boston and spends his days fruitlessly explaining to people up there the difference between “cookout” and “barbeque.”
STEPHANIE WHETSTONE is a lecturer in the English Department when she’s at UNC Greensboro and a fiction writer when she’s in Durham, NC. She has lost track of all the hats she is supposed to wear, but they’re around here somewhere. She went to Duke for the basketball and UNC Greensboro for the writing program. She was also a fiction editor for The Greensboro Review. Stephanie is from Kentucky, which is why she talks like that.

Assistant Poetry Editors

A graduate of the UNC Greensboro MFA Writing Program, JEREMY AUFRANCE has had poems published in Red Rock Review and Backwards City Review. He lives in Greensboro with his wife and children.
ANGIE DeCOLA’s poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for Best New Poets and won prizes from the Lynda Hull Memorial and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg foundations. A pastry chef and freelance food writer, she lives in Greensboro, NC.
An Alabama native, TOY HARMON now lives in New Orleans, LA. She received her MFA from UNC Greensboro, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry.
ADAM TARLETON received his MFA in poetry from UNC Greensboro in 2003. His poems and reviews have appeared in the Hudson Review, Carolina Quarterly, and Poet Lore. Currently, he is employed as an attorney in private practice in Greensboro, NC, where he lives with his wife, Melissa, and their two sons.
MELISSA TARLETON is an erstwhile poet living in Greensboro, NC. She and her husband are the very tired parents of two young sons. When she’s not missing her writing time, she enjoys gardening, reading, and making old things look new again.
JENNIFER WHITAKER is a lecturer in English and assistant director of the University Writing Center at UNC Greensboro. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Mid-American Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review, Drunken Boat, and Pebble Lake Review. She has won an Academy of American Poets prize and two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prizes.

Editors Emeriti

Founding Editor JASON SANFORD is the author of a number of short stories, essays, and articles. He is the winner of a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship and his stories have been published in magazines such as The Mississippi Review, Diagram, The Beloit Fiction Journal, Analog: Science Fiction and Fact, Interzone, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Pindeldyboz, and other places. He’s also published critical essays and book reviews in places like The New York Review of Science Fiction, The Pedestal Magazine, and The Fix Short Fiction Review. His website is www.jasonsanford.com.
Founding Editor JAKE ADAM YORK, originally from Alabama, is now a resident of Denver, Colorado, and an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center where he directs the undergraduate Creative Writing program and edits Copper Nickel with his students. His first book of poems, Murder Ballads, was published in 2005 by Elixir Press, and a new chapbook is forthcoming from Poetry West. His poems have appeared in Southern Review, New Orleans Review, Greensboro Review, Quarterly West, Gulf Coast, Third Coast, DIAGRAM, Octopus, H_NGM_N, and other journals. Jake is also a contributing editor for Shenandoah.