12 Southern Writers to Read Alongside the Canon

Shining a light on the tradition, wherever you are in the journey

When people talk about Southern literature, the same names rise to the surface. Faulkner. O’Connor. Welty. Gay. McCarthy. For good reason—those writers made the tradition what it is, and anyone working seriously in it is working with them whether they intend to or not.

But one of the things we’ve learned running Porchlight is that the conversation doesn’t stop with the dead. It keeps going, in living rooms and on back porches and in the kind of small journals that don’t always make the syllabi. We started this journal because we believed that, and every issue we put out is an argument for it.

The twelve writers below are ones we’ve had the privilege of featuring—people whose work has genuinely shaped how we think about what Southern writing is doing right now. Some of them are widely read. Some deserve a much wider audience than they have. All of them are worth your time.

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The writers

Cary Holladay

Cary writes with a kind of restraint that makes the emotional freight of her stories land harder. She doesn’t explain family; she renders it. Her work sits with ambiguity long after most writers would have tied the knot, and that patience is what makes her fiction feel true. I read her before I fully understood why her work affected me the way it did, and eventually I had to ask. We talked for a Porchlight interview during my MFA, and the conversation only deepened what I already suspected: she is the real thing.

Wes Blake

Wes’s work resists the two failure modes that trap a lot of contemporary Southern fiction: sentimentality on one end, grit-lit performance on the other. What he does instead is harder—he grounds atmosphere in specificity, lets reflection arrive earned rather than announced, and trusts the reader to carry some of the weight. That trust shows up on the page.

David Joy

David is one of the most important voices working in Appalachian fiction right now, and we don’t think that’s an overstatement. His novels confront the violence and inheritance of mountain life without flinching and without flattening the people inside those realities into symbols. I’d been reading him for years before I finally got to sit down with him at the Tremont Writers Conference, and he was exactly what his work suggested: generous, serious, and completely uninterested in pretense. If you haven’t read Where All Light Tends to Go, start there. Then read everything else.

George Singleton

George has been one of the sharpest working writers in the South for decades, and he still doesn’t get the credit he deserves outside of the region. His stories move between humor and grief with unusual ease—not because he’s glib, but because he understands that the two are rarely far apart in the places he writes about. He is the kind of writer other writers read for technique.

Michael Farris Smith

Michael writes the kind of prose that slows you down. There’s a stark lyricism to it. His sentences carry weather and landscape and moral weight all at once, and his subject matter, the men and women living at the edges of the modern South, matches that register exactly. Desperation Road is a good entry point. Don’t read it before bed.

Gaylord Brewer

Gaylord’s poems reward the kind of reading most people only give prose—careful, slow, willing to go back. There’s intelligence and genuine musicality in his work, and an emotional restraint that trusts the image to do what argument can’t. He is a poet who makes you feel like you’ve been somewhere by the time you reach the final line.

K. B. Ballentine

K.B. writes about landscape, faith, and family in ways that find emotional depth without reaching for it. The quiet in her poems is purposeful; a space where memory and meaning accumulate rather than dissipate. Her work is the kind that readers tend to return to, finding something different each time.

Malcolm Glass

Malcolm brings a sharp observational intelligence to work that is deeply attentive to how the South changes and how it doesn’t. He submitted ekphrastic poems and photographs to Porchlight, work that moves between image and language in ways that feel genuinely earned. He has been at it for decades, outside of academia, which says something about why the work carries the weight it does.

Ron Rash

Ron has earned his place in the conversation about Appalachian literature not just because of the volume of his output, but because of its consistency. Novel, story, poem—he moves across forms with the same precision, the same restraint, the same refusal to sentimentalize what he loves. If you read nothing else, read the opening pages of Saints at the River. They will tell you everything you need to know about what he can do, and you won’t stop there.

Jesse Graves

Jesse’s poems have the quality of land that has been worked for a long time—you feel the history under the surface. His attention to ecology, labor, and Appalachian identity is serious without being academic, and the poems themselves move with a quiet authority that earns the emotional claims they make.

Jeff Hardin

Jeff’s poems carry a quiet intelligence and emotional clarity that accumulates the way good Southern storytelling does: slowly, then all at once. Our editor in chief and I ran into him at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville this past fall, and he mentioned almost offhand that he writes nearly a poem a day. That kind of discipline shows in the work. These are poems that have been lived with, and they reward the same from the reader.

Ellen Morris Prewitt

Ellen brings humor, curiosity, and genuine humanity to the question of what it means to write the South now. Her work doesn’t settle for received versions of regional identity—it presses on the edges of those versions and finds something more interesting underneath. I was fortunate enough to be part of a writing group with her, and I can tell you firsthand that her eye for authenticity is second to none. She’s one of those writers who makes the tradition feel alive.

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The South has never lacked for storytellers. What it sometimes lacks is sustained attention to the ones working right now, in the present tense, without the benefit of retrospect.

That’s what Porchlight is for. We’re not interested in the museum version of Southern literature—we’re interested in the argument it’s still making, the writers carrying it forward, the work that resists easy categorization while staying deeply rooted in place.

You can read work from all of these writers in our archives. We’re glad they trusted us with their talent.

Cary Holladay Wes Blake Jeff Hardin KB Ballentine Jesse Graves Ellen Morris Prewitt