I grew up on a farm in South Georgia. We had cattle, peanut and melon crops, and pines for cutting into pulpwood. Days were for working, nights for walking the dirt road that split the land. In winter, the sky. My writing comes from the humid air, the sand-grit of that place.
In Spring 2024 Pulley Press, whose mission is to give voice to rural writers, published Glass Cabin, a book of poems Tina and I wrote about building our home in rural Alabama. Glass Cabin is Southern Literary Review’s 2024 Poetry Book of the Year and one of AWF’s Best Books of 2024.
We have been building for thirteen years now. The work goes slow because everything we do is by hand. By hand because we don’t have a lot of money. By hand because we rather do the work ourselves and see what we can learn from it. You can read more about us and our life on Instagram @glasscabindiary and at my blog, Glass Cabin Diary.
My collection of stories, This Ditch-Walking Love, winner of the Tartt Fiction Award, is set in the Murphrees Valley section of the Cumberland Plateau where I now live, where ridges lift above what creeks and small rivers have made. Because the characters in these stories don’t have enough money to carry them, they rely on a network of plateau fields, creeks, woods, and clay roads. It might be enough, a field row in August for walking and gathering tomatoes and okra up, or a bluff for jumping off of into the Locust Fork River, or a drive out to Jick’s Chevrolet just to see his hellfire cars. These are the places everyone goes to, looking for what they can’t make full on their own. This Ditch-Walking Love was published in 2021 by Livingston Press. I’m recording an audiobook of Ditch-Walking.
My novels Birmingham, 35 Miles and Snakeskin Road are about environmental disasters in a future South. Birmingham, 35 Miles follows a group of clay miners left behind to live in a dust bowl in Alabama. Snakeskin Road follows one woman leaving this dust bowl for what she hopes is something better. Both novels were inspired by summers of drought when I worked the melon fields, inspired by the people I worked with. My chapbook of poems, Weathervane, meditates on the connection between family and nature.
I’ve also received fellowships from Hot Springs National Park, Alabama State Council on the Arts, and Georgia Council for the Arts. I teach creative writing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Thank you for visiting. You can reach me here, southverve at gmail.com.