Our mission

See that pretty picture below? 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 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.

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

Awards

Since its launch in 2001, storySouth has become well known for its unique look at southern writing. Stories, essays, and poetry published in storySouth have been honored by the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Arts and Letters Daily and MobyLives; in addition, two other stories were selected for the first anthology of best web-published fiction of the year. storySouth has also been reviewed by the Bodega Survey on Web del Sol and is listed as a “Contributing Small Press” for the Pushcart Prize. Finally, storySouth’s annual Million Writers Award has been named a Hot Site by USA Today and was the subject of a feature interview with storySouth founding editor Jason Sanford in the 2005 Novel and Short Stories Writers Market.

Staff

Editor TERRY KENNEDY is the author of the poetry collection New River Breakdown and the limited edition chapbook Until the Clouds Shatter the Light That Plates our Lives, selected by Thomas Lux for Jeanne Duval Editions. His work appears in a variety of journals and magazines including Cave Wall, from the Fishouse, Waccamaw, and The Southern Review. He currently serves as the Director of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at UNC Greensboro Follow him on Twitter @terrylkennedy.

Fiction Editor JEN JULIAN is a writer, dabbling illustrator, and transient North Carolinian. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri, Columbia, and an MFA in Fiction from UNC Greensboro. Her debut short story collection, Earthly Delights and Other Apocalypses, was the winner of Press 53’s 2018 Fiction Prize and published in the same year. Recent fiction and essays have appeared in or are upcoming in Wigleaf, Milk Candy Review, X-R-A-Y, Okay Donkey, SmokeLong Quarterly, Jellyfish Review, JuxtaProse, and TriQuarterly, among other places. She is a 2016 Clarion alumna, fond of sci-fi and fairy tales, ambient music, true crime, orchids, and listening to you tell your ghost stories. She and her fluffy ginger cat currently live in the mountains of northern Georgia, where she is an Assistant Professor of English at Young Harris College. You can find her online at https://jenjulian.com/.

Creative Nonfiction Editor CYNTHIA NEARMAN is an Assistant Professor of English at Guilford College where 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.

M.M. Porter

Poetry Editor M. M. Porter is attending Ohio University to pursue her PhD in English with an emphasis in Poetry. She is a graduate of the MFA poetry program at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro where she served as a poetry editor for The Greensboro Review. She has been published or has poems forthcoming in Epiphany, The Shore, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Originally from Michigan, you can find her work at mm-porter.com.

Assistant Fiction Editor EMMA BOGGS is a writer of fiction and nonfiction who lives in Greensboro, North Carolina. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus and The Rappahannock Review. Emma received her MFA in fiction from UNCG, where she served as the Managing Editor for The Greensboro Review.

Assistant Fiction Editor KIANA GOVONI is a graduate of UNC Greensboro, where she received her MFA in fiction and where she served as fiction editor for The Greensboro Review. Her work has been featured in or is forthcoming in The Broken Plate, Witness, The Minnesota Review, The Good Life Review, Rappahannock Review, and elsewhere.

Contributing Reviews Editor SHAWN DELGADO earned his B.S. in Science, Technology, and Culture from Georgia Tech and his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he currently teaches. He is the author of the chapbook A Sky Half-Dismantled (Jeanne Duval Editions). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Courtland Review, Connotations, The Greensboro Review, Five Points, Ghost Ocean, Terminus Magazine, and elsewhere.

Evan Fackler

Contributing Interviews Editor EVAN FACKLER has served as editor-in-chief of Oxford Magazine and as a fiction editor at The Greensboro Review. His reviews and interviews can be found online at Entropy Magazine and storySouth.

Cory Mac Pherson

Assistant Poetry Editor CORY MAC PHERSON is a graduate of UNC Greensboro with an MFA in poetry, where she served as Poetry Editor for The Greensboro Review and Programs Coordinator for Write On! Greensboro. Since graduating in 2015, she has published two books for a library-bound circulating non-fiction series: Inventions in Reading and Writing: From Calligraphy to E-readers and Inventions in Visual Art: From Cave Paintings to CAD. She is currently living in Wilmington, North Carolina where she is working on her first manuscript of poems, which focuses on the Korean-American adoptee experience.

Assistant Fiction Editor EMILY MATHIS is an educational psychologist and completed her MFA in fiction at UNCG. Her essay, “Men Smoking,” won the creative nonfiction prize for The Erotic contest by Sonora Review (2024). In the past year, her nonfiction has been a finalist for Fourth Genre’s Michael Steinberg Memorial Essay contest, Terry Tempest Williams Creative Nonfiction Prize (North American Review), the Sixth Annual Sewanee Review Nonfiction contest, the 2024 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards, and Epiphany‘s Breakout! Prize (Prose, 2024). Her essays have recently appeared in, or are forthcoming in, Sonora Review, Hunger Mountain, Epiphany, Another Chicago Magazine, and others. She is revising a collection of essays and is on Instagram@emily_a_mathis

Assistant Fiction Editor PATRICIA PATTERSON is a Mexican-American writer based in North Carolina. She holds an MFA from UNC Greensboro, where she served as a fiction editor for The Greensboro Review. Her stories are featured in PANK, wildness, Platypus Press, and elsewhere. Patricia is currently at work on a collection of short stories that inhabit small corners of Mexico, North Carolina, and California.

Cat Robinson

Assistant Poetry Editor CAT ROBINSON is a writer and poet from South Carolina. A former poetry editor for The Greensboro Review, their work investigates how the experiences of the self and vaster concepts in life are reflected on and through the body.

Assistant Fiction Editor LEIGH CAMACHO ROURKS is a Cuban-American author who lives and works in Central Florida, where she is an Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at Beacon College. She is the recipient of the St. Lawrence Book Award, the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and the Robert Watson Literary Review Prize, and her work has been shortlisted for several other awards. Her fiction, poems, and essays have appeared in a number of journals, including Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, RHINO, TriQuarterly, December Magazine, and The Greensboro Review. http://lcrourks.com/

Assistant Poetry Editor GREG TREDORE holds his MFA from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he served as the Assistant Poetry Editor on The Greensboro Review. His poems have appeared in journals such as Illuminations, The Inkling, and The Voice. He is currently an Associate Professor of English at Georgia Military College.

Assistant Poetry Editor PJ WILLIAMS teaches in North Carolina. A recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, his poems have appeared in Cincinnati Review, The Adroit Journal, Ninth Letter, The Pinch, Salt Hill, and others. New work appears in Frontier Poetry. He is co-editor of the anthology It Was Written: Poetry Inspired by Hip-Hop (Minor Arcana Press). He holds degrees from Elon University and the University of Alabama.

Editors Emeriti

Contributing Editor JULIE FUNDERBURK is a native North Carolinian. Her full-length collection of poetry “The Door that Always Opens” will be published by LSU Press in the fall of 2016. Her work appears in literary journals such as 32 Poems, Best New Poets, Blackbird, The Cincinnati Review, and Ploughshares, and her chapbook “Thoughts to Fold into Birds” is available from Unicorn Press. For her poetry, she has been awarded a North Carolina Arts Council Artist Fellowship and scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences. She serves as a Board of Trustees member for the North Carolina Writers’ Network and teaches at Queens University of Charlotte in NC. https://www.juliefunderburk.com/

Contributing Editor DREW PERRY is the author of the novels Kids These Days and This Is Just Exactly Like You. He 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, and is a regular contributor to Our State Magazine. He teaches in the undergraduate creative writing program at Elon University. https://drewperry.net/

Contributing Editor ANDREW SAULTERS is author of “No, It’s Just You,” a memoir in 58 one-act plays and one montage. He currently serves as the Editor and Publisher of Unicorn Press.

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, was a resident of Denver, Colorado, and an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center where he directed the undergraduate Creative Writing program and edited Copper Nickel with his students. His first book of poems, Murder Ballads, was published in 2005 by Elixir Press. His poems appeared in Southern Review, New Orleans Review, Greensboro Review, Quarterly West, Gulf Coast, Third Coast, DIAGRAM, Octopus, H_NGM_N, and other journals. Jake was also a contributing editor for Shenandoah. He passed away in 2012.

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