Hey Friends,
I am delighted to join The Bitter Southerner as senior consulting editor. My role, as I see it, is equal parts visionary, editorial adviser, implementer, and cheerleader.
You won’t see my byline much, but know that I am quietly working behind the scenes, encouraging the BS team to dream big while working through practical ways to implement our expansive ideas.
I’m also committed to helping The Bitter Southerner move us all toward a better South, a more inclusive place where Black lives truly matter, where we all rise, and where everyone has a place — and a strong, unfettered voice — at the welcome table.
To that end, I am excited to tell y’all about Summer Voices: The Bitter Southerner Guest Editor Series!
We have assembled a dream roster of amazing thinkers and creatives who will generously share their visions for our region and our world. During the third week of each month, May through September, one of the guest editors will do a friendly takeover of the digital publication — offering a glimpse into their creative minds, their Southern obsessions, and their hopes for this ripe moment in history.
Photo courtesy of Maneet Chauhan
A longtime judge on the Food Network show “Chopped,” chef Maneet Chauhan and her business-partner husband, Vivek Deora, moved to Nashville to open Chauhan Ale & Masala House in 2014. Since then, the hospitality group Maneet co-founded has launched three more restaurants, delighting Nashvillians and tourists alike with contemporary Chinese dishes at Tansuo, modern-diner fare at The Mockingbird, and Indian street-food favorites at Chaatable. Maneet’s cookbooks — Flavors of My World and Chaat: Recipes From the Kitchens, Markets, and Railways of India — reflect her “global fusion” cooking style, which shows a deep pride in her Indian culinary heritage while also incorporating the cultural and culinary influences of her journeys around the world, including in the American South.
Maneet is particularly grateful for the classic Southern hospitality she has experienced in Nashville. “When you come from big cities like New York and Chicago, you do not see a lot of this — the camaraderie, the feeling of belonging, the sense that the culinary industry is a fraternity, and we are here to support each other. I see that every day,” Maneet told Southern Living. “It's incredible. It actually helps you become so much better as a chef and as a person. That’s what I love about Nashville. Not only have I seen myself growing as a chef, but I’ve also seen myself growing as a human being.”
Photo by imani Khayyam
Actress, activist, and writer Aunjanue Ellis stars as Hippolyta Freeman on HBO’s wildly popular horror-drama series “Lovecraft Country.” She was nominated for a 2019 Emmy Award for her performance in Ava DuVernay’s “When They See Us,” and she won critical acclaim in 2020 for her role as underappreciated musical genius Mattie Moss Clark in “The Clark Sisters: First Ladies of Gospel.” Aunjanue’s work in movies and television extends back to the mid-1990s, and she has been an integral cast member on such popular shows as “The Mentalist,” “NCIS: Los Angeles,” and “Quantico.” Her upcoming roles include star turns in the TV series “61st Street” and the film “King Richard,” in which she and Will Smith portray the parents of Venus and Serena Williams.
Despite her prolific career in Hollywood, Aunjanue still maintains her family home — and her driver’s license — in Pike County, Mississippi, where she was raised by her grandmother. Aunjanue was instrumental in the effort to remove the Confederate symbol from the Mississippi state flag. She was working in Los Angeles when the flag came down in July 2020, but she drove home to Mississippi soon after, Aunjanue told The Bitter Southerner. When she crossed the state line, she stopped at a rest area that previously hoisted the Confederate flag. It was gone. “To come back in the middle of the night and look up at that flagpole and there’s nothing there,” Aunjanue says, “I felt a certain type of freedom.”
She remains committed to changing the South by claiming it as her own. “I see Mississippi as an abandoned place,” she says. Many Black Southerners have abandoned it — “for good reason,” she notes. “But we left an opportunity, and the bigots took it — and Lord what we have wrought.” She further explains: “Mississippi is the Africa of this country. All bloody and beautiful roads that have led Black folks to where they are now start here. It is also the center — the petri dish — of white supremacy in this country in its present form.” She sees her work as “nothing short of a direct action against it.”
Photo by Peter Kramer / NBC NewsWire
Charlayne Hunter-Gault, the now legendary journalist, first captured the media’s attention 6o years ago when she became one of the first two Black students to desegregate the University of Georgia. In January 1961, she and her classmate Hamilton Holmes walked onto campus to register for classes and were met by a crowd of reporters and jeering students chanting, “Two-four-six-eight! We don’t want to integrate!” Despite some difficult days, Charlayne graduated from UGA in 1963 and pursued an illustrious career in journalism, working with The New York Times, PBS, CNN, and NPR. The iconic journalist and author (of In My Place, To the Mountaintop: My Journey Through the Civil Rights Movement, New News Out of Africa, and the forthcoming My People) has spent much of the year so far reflecting on the 60th anniversary of the university’s desegregation, she says, “as a Black person and a woman, as a wife and mother, as a sister, aunt, and citizen.” Remaining true to her calling as a journalist, she will use her guest editorship at The Bitter Southerner to inspire us “to make sure that your armor is fitted and polished so that you can help bind wounds and defeat the kind of divisions that are tearing at the fabric of our nation.”
Photo by diwang Valdez
Lance and April Ledbetter “are perhaps the most important preservers of folk music in the modern world,” The Bitter Southerner declared in a 2014 profile of the couple. And they do it all from the basement of their unassuming little brick house in southeast Atlanta. For more than 20 years, they have documented the folk music, stories, and photographs of communities around the world, assembling them into carefully curated box sets, digital downloads accompanied by beautiful booklets with insightful essays and annotations, and other impeccably crafted products. Their company has a name that perfectly reflects their work: Dust-to-Digital. The Ledbetters cultivate such treasures as “Excavated Shellac: An Alternate History of the World’s Music,” which includes 100 recordings and 100 stories highlighting music that “is often invisible in today’s world,” as the Ledbetters put it. Their box set “Voices of Mississippi: Artists and Musicians Documented by William Ferris” received Grammy Awards in both the best historical album and best liner notes categories. This 2019 release represents the life work of William Ferris, one of the preeminent living scholars of Southern culture.
Ferris’ words about Dust-to-Digital give us a sense of the kind of magic we might witness during their Bitter Southerner takeover: “I think Dust-to-Digital and Lance and April Ledbetter represent a very important new chapter in documenting the American South’s music and culture,” Ferris has said. Though he acknowledges that their musical interests span the world, Ferris adds, “I think the fact that Dust-to-Digital is located in the South means they are grounded in the region. Until them, all the great historical Southern recordings were released by the Library of Congress or record companies in Germany or Japan. Wherever music carries them, they go, but the foundation of what they do is the American South.”
photo by Brinson + Banks
Wayne White is an artist, art director, illustrator, and puppeteer. Raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Wayne has used his memories of the South to create inspired works for film, television, and the fine-art world. Early in his career, in 1986, he began working on the children’s television show “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” where his work on set and puppet designs won three Emmys. He also supplied a number of voices on the show, which TV Guide has named one of the “Top Cult Shows Ever.” “It was fantastic,” White says of his years working on the “Playhouse.” “It was a dream. Just to be in the center of the world’s attention like that working as an artist. I always say it was just like a downtown New York art project that happened to get on TV. It was that. That’s its power.”
Fast-forward some 30 years later and Wayne is still doing powerful work in a variety of disciplines, from puppetry to painting. In January 2020, he announced his fourth solo art show at the Joshua Liner Gallery in New York, and in April 2020, he released a series of 18 never-before-seen drawings completed between 2012 and 2020. This release coincided with the debut of a series of short puppet shows that Wayne created for Instagram. Though he’s lived in California since the 1990s, Wayne’s identity remains largely rooted in the South, he told The Bitter Southerner. And today, through his large environmental-art projects and his word paintings, he gets to be unapologetically and fully himself. “I never stopped being a Southerner,” Wayne says. “I couldn’t. That's who I was. I wanted that voice in my work somehow. It's something that had to happen.”
Photo by jason thrasher
As a longtime arts journalist, author, and professor of journalism at the University of Georgia, I have met, interviewed, and worked with hundreds of dynamic creators at the top of their game in various disciplines. Still, this stellar roster of guest editors makes my jaw drop like Gomer Pyle’s. (How many of you Bitter Southerners are old enough to get that reference?) I could not be prouder of this lineup or more honored to work with these guest editors and with the dedicated core team at The Bitter Southerner.
As another outstanding Southerner, André Benjamin (aka André 3000), once put it: “The South got something to say.” This dream team of guest editors will help us to say it in groundbreaking ways that will allow us — and provoke us — to all rise.