by Angela Tucker for South Summit 2023 Spanish moss choking live oak trees is one of the most recognizable images of Louisiana’s landscape. A plant that lives in a tree without any contact with the ground, Spanish moss is an epiphyte and causes no harm to the tree itself. It…

by Hanna Lane Miller for South Summit 2023 It was the summer of 2012, and it was either mini skirts or carburetors. A new set of choices sat ahead that, if played right, led to my one goal: getting out of Mississippi. From the time I could read, I knew…

by Lo Jackson for South Summit 2023 From what I remember my childhood was perfect; although like any family we had our struggles my memories are of the good times outdoors with family and friends. One of those memories is of my best friend Trent and I on his grandparents…

by Elaine McMillion Sheldon for South Summit 2023 (Keynote Speech) It’s an honor to join you today. I have great respect for the New Orleans Film Society — a model for the thriving film community — that not only creates powerful work — but supports new talent. …

by Amber Love, New Orleans Film Festival Programmer — There is a surprising amount of ways to say that a film is “messy.” It has a lot of ideas, it didn’t know what it was going for, it’s convoluted, inconsistent, incoherent. Being messy is equated with being confused, misdirected, and unrefined. …

by Cierra Chenier for South Summit 2022 — I come from an old place at the bottom of the map, strategically located at the curve of the Mississippi River and surrounded by bayous, swamps, lakes, and wetlands. The resourcefulness and intellect of Indigenous people allowed for this once swampland to exist, developing a portage called Bayou Road that…

by April Dobbins for South Summit 2022 — When I write about the South, it is almost always a lie. Not a direct lie but a lie of omission. People only welcome the stories that they expect to hear from Southerners. The land is wild and unruly. The green chokes the winding orange of the dirt road. Wildflowers…

by Ryan Craver for South Summit 2022 — Had Peggy Kreider’s obituary come to me in a newspaper to be unfurled in poetic morning light over earl grey, I might have read it sooner. But it came as a link in a text message, so it sat in my phone for a week. Opening a text is one…

by A.J. Riggins for South Summit 2022 — Born and bred in the backwoods of the backwoods. What we have now is true, but I have a confession. I once hated you… Let me explain. I remember being ten years old. Our house sat isolated in the middle of a long dirt road. No other humans in sight…