Marcie Cohen Ferris – författare

This issue of Southern Cultures features contributions by DeLana R. A., Adam Gussow, Melissa Gwynn, John Oliver Hodges, Meredith L. McCoy, Anthony J. Stanonis, William Sturkey, and Rachel Wallace.

From vanishing coastlines in the Carolinas to the toxic legacies of coal ash, and from reclamations of Indigenous histories in Louisiana to Black radical environmentalism in the Tidewater, meet the Human/Nature issue of Southern Cultures. As guest editor Andy Horowitz writes, this issue ""advocates for a humane vision of how people live in and with the world around them--a view of the environment as, at once, a material landscape that crunches under foot and burns on the skin, and an intellectual terrain, where ideas about place inform people's views of the world.

Guest edited by T. Dionne Bailey and Garrett Felber, this issue of Southern Cultures makes visible a radical US South which has long envisioned a world without policing, prisons, or other forms of punishment. A region so often exceptionalized for its brutality and white supremacy is also the seedbed of freedom dreams and radical movement traditions.

Guest edited by Regina N. Bradley, the Sonic South Issue examines sound. From Deafness to silence to a tool of liberation, "Sound is where the South can be its most complicated and unapologetic," writes Bradley, "where it can boast its plurality and multiple communities.

This is a historic tour of southern Jewish foodways. Since early colonial times in America, Jewish southerners have been tempted by delectable regional foods. Because some of these foods - including pork and shellfish - have been traditionally forbidden to Jews by religious dietary laws, southern Jews face a special predicament. In a culinary journey through the Jewish South, Arkansas native Marcie Cohen Ferris explores how southern Jews embraced, avoided, and adapted southern food and, in the process, have found themselves at home. From colonial Savannah and Charleston to Civil War - era New Orleans and Natchez, from New South Atlanta to contemporary Memphis and across the Mississippi and Arkansas Deltas, Ferris examines the expressive power of food throughout southern Jewish history. She demonstrates how southern Jews reinvented traditions as they adjusted to living in a largely Christian world where they were bound by regional rules of race, class, and gender. Featuring a trove of photographs, ""Matzoh Ball Gumbo"" also includes anecdotes, oral histories, and more than thirty recipes to try at home. Ferris's rich tour of southern Jewish foodways shows that, at the dining table, Jewish southerners created a distinctive religious expression that reflects the evolution of southern Jewish life.

In The Edible South, Marcie Cohen Ferris presents food as a new way to chronicle the American South's larger history. Ferris tells a richly illustrated story of southern food and the struggles of whites, blacks, Native Americans, and other people of the region to control the nourishment of their bodies and minds, livelihoods, lands, and citizenship. The experience of food serves as an evocative lens onto colonial settlements and antebellum plantations, New South cities and Civil Rights-era lunch counters, chronic hunger and agricultural reform, counterculture communes and iconic restaurants as Ferris reveals how food - as cuisine and as commodity - has expressed and shaped southern identity to the present day.The region in which European settlers were greeted with unimaginable natural abundance was simultaneously the place where enslaved Africans vigilantly preserved cultural memory in cuisine and Native Americans held tight to kinship and food traditions despite mass expulsions. Southern food, Ferris argues, is intimately connected to the politics of power. The contradiction between the realities of fulsomeness and deprivation, privilege and poverty, in southern history resonates in the region's food traditions, both beloved and maligned.

Marcie Cohen Ferris gathers a constellation of leading journalists, farmers, chefs, entrepreneurs, scholars, and food activists—along with photographer Baxter Miller— to offer a deeply immersive portrait of North Carolina's contemporary food landscape. Ranging from manifesto to elegy, Edible North Carolina's essays, photographs, interviews, and recipes combine for a beautifully revealing journey across the lands and waters of a state that exemplifies the complexities of American food and identity. While North Carolina's food heritage is grounded in core ingredients and the proximity of farm to table, this book reveals striking differences among food-centered cultures and businesses across the state. Documenting disparities among people's access to food and farmland—and highlighting community and state efforts toward fundamental solutions—Edible North Carolina shows how culinary excellence, entrepreneurship, and the struggle for racial justice converge in shaping food equity, not only for North Carolinians, but for all Americans.Starting with Vivian Howard, star of PBS's A Chef's Life, who wrote the foreword, the contributors include Shorlette Ammons, Karen Amspacher, Victoria Bouloubasis, Katy Clune, Gabe Cumming, Marcie Cohen Ferris, Sandra Gutierrez, Tom Hanchett, Michelle King, Cheetie Kumar, Courtney Lewis, Malinda Maynor Lowery, Ronni Lundy, Keia Mastrianni, April McGreger, Baxter Miller, Ricky Moore, Carla Norwood, Kathleen Purvis, Andrea Reusing, Bill Smith, Maia Surdam, and Andrea Weigl.

Rejecting the well-worn narratives of pity, scorn, othering, and medicalization that exist primarily for the benefit of the non-disabled, disabled people insist on better and richer stories about disability as a way of being and a way of knowing," writes guest editor Charles L. Hughes. "This issue is rooted in a commitment to this call.

In more than 60 photographs, the Snapshot: Climate issue presents an on-the-ground look at climate impacts across the South. And in essays and conversations with leading climate educators and advocates including Heather McTeer Toney, James W. C. White, Angel Hsu, and Katharine Hayhoe, the issue examines how climate is "an everything issue.

Home holds dualities and contradictions: celebration and lament; threat and safety; disaster and sanctuary; stability and mobility; ownership (heirs' property) and displacement (gentrification, climate catastrophes); rootedness and migration; steadiness and instability; happy reunions and complicated returns. In this issue, guest edited by Blair LM Kelley and LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant, we explore critical reflections of home that invoke the necessity of grounding in place, understanding that while the meanings of home are myriad (and both universal and discrete), the word home, as a concept, invokes something for everyone.

People have always told the story of the queer South. Still, both silenced and emerging stories of the queer South remain to be told. In a region (and nation) where ideological battles over family life, gender, and sexual politics continue to unfold, the South is crucial terrain for doing this meaning-making as well as critically examining the ever-changing context of queerness in the present day. Guest edited by Hooper Schultz and Jaime Harker.

It’s been thirty years since André “3000” Benjamin declared “the South got something to say,” and for the decades since this pivotal moment the region has spoken. In this issue, we contextualize Benjamin’s interruption and expand southern hip-hop’s historiographical and sociocultural landscapes. To cover the significance of southern hip-hop as life and culture, we need new language and fresh voices to speak to what makes southern hip-hop special—its resonance, (r)evolution, and reach.

Country music is as mythologized as the region with which it’s most closely associated, and it remains one of the South’s biggest cultural signifiers. It is an especially apt moment to reflect on country music’s significance. In tangible ways, the genre has never been more popular. Last summer, country songs claimed the top three spots on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for the first time. Pop stars, from Beyoncé and Lana Del Rey to Post Malone, have gone country. Nashville, the home of the country music business and a vacation destination where fans live out the genre’s myths as weekend cowboys, welcomed a record-breaking 16.8 million visitors in 2023. The current country music craze comes as the country music business celebrates a century of steady growth and the adoration of fans worldwide.Guest edited by Amanda Marie Martînez.