Hub City Press 2024 Catalog

2024

HUB CITY PRESS

200

Spartanburg, SC 29306

Phone: 864-577-9349

info@hubcity.org / www.hubcity.org

Executive Director: Meg Reid

Managing Editor: Kate McMullen

Sales & Marketing Assistant: Julie Jarema

Editor: Katherine Webb

Betsy Teter, Founder, Retired

John Lane, Founder, Retired

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Dear reader,

Here are a few exciting things that have happened since my last letter: our 2023 books were featured in best of year lists by Oprah Daily, Kirkus, Electric Lit, and Book Riot; best of season lists by People Magazine, the Boston Globe, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and The Millions; and received coverage by the New York Times, PBS, Poets & Writers, Garden & Gun, The Bitter Southerner, and more Last year, our books received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Foreword Reviews One of our novels was picked as a Read This Next Pick by SIBA booksellers. We also had a book win an Earphones Award, had a mention on The Ezra Klein Show and a backlist novel selected for the Great Read’s program at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. Our authors went on book tours across 14 states and various festivals. Most recently, we have launched a brand new series, The Hub City Press BIPOC Poetry Series, with the Poet Laureate of the state of Alabama Ashley M Jones as the Editor-at-Large.

And we have another incredible line-up of books for the 2024 season!

In the spring, we’ll publish acclaimed South Carolina poet Ray McManus’s first collection in ten years (the previous being Punch., which we published back in Fall 2014), The Last Saturday in America. Continuing with poetry, in April, we’ll publish the highly anticipated Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves by MacArthur “genius” Grant Recipient J. Drew Lanham. In May, we have a fun, gritty summer debut novel, Bomb Island by Stephen Hundley that explores sub-culture communities, survival, and found family set on an island near an unexploded atomic bomb.

Later in the year, we‘ll kick off our fall season with award-winning author Minrose Gwin‘s novel, Beautiful Dreamers, set in the Mississippi Gulf and all about betrayal, love and intolerance, and the care and honesty we owe the families we choose Next is our New Southern Voices Poetry Prize winner, Emilie Menzel‘s book, The Girl Who Became a Rabbit, a fabular prose poem selected by Molly McCully Brown. Later in September, we‘ll publish Neesha Powell-Ingabire‘s powerful debut memoir, Come By Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia’s Geechee Coast that reckons with their home’s collective history. In October, we‘ll publish Little Ones by Grey Wolfe LaJoie, a collection of fiction and graphic ephemera informed by Appalachian experience and traditions of Southern storytelling. Rounding out our list, we have a local book, North of Main, about new neighborhoods that emerged in Spartanburg in the 1870s as emancipated Black men and women spent their hard-won post-slavery wages to purchase lots and build homes.

We are extremely grateful to our literary community both near and far our authors, booksellers, librarians, and of course, our readers. You allow us to continue to challenge the idea of Southern literature and to publish and broaden the voices telling our stories.

Meg Reid, Publisher

Praise for The Last Saturday in America

“These are poems about boys listening to men who were once boys who listened to men, the blind leading the blind leading the blind through the dark Some boys grow up Some men never do Ray McManus has chipped away at the pageantry and performance, the stupidity of the lie, the outright futility of it all The Last Saturday in America is, 'a song that pays homage / to a history of work we should’ve done better ' Here’s hoping one day we do ”

—David Joy, author of Those We Thought We Knew, from the introduction

“The poems in this collection are deeply invested in the rural South, interrogating ideas of masculinity and inheritance The straightforward syntax suits the unvarnished subject matter—childhood bullies, Dale Earnhardt, the neighbor shooting snakes with his pistol The plainspoken is elevated through McManus’s carefully tuned ear and nuanced appreciated for anaphora and sonic density You won’t want the sun to set on The Last Saturday in America—it’s a moving, masterful work ”

—Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs

“I’ve always been a sucker for folks that have the innate ability to present complex human emotions in a simplified language Massive ideas reduced to small, palatable portions As a writer, you’re lucky if you can perform this magic trick once or twice, but this just seems to be how Ray operates Effortlessly endearing while remaining razor sharp Calling out the place he’s from while singing its praises at the same time This dichotomy is the bedrock of effective southern literature and in this collection, Ray makes it look easy ”

—BJ Barham of American Aquarium

“This new collection by Ray McManus is the punch of that punchline, an elegy for those boys-that-will-beboys born into an American South just daring them to bash their brains jumping off bridges and to take blind curves far too fast These are boys forged by the fires of toxic masculinity, boys that become shift workers fuming in crawl spaces and sand pits, tearing apart block houses and repair shops, men damaged by a deep history of colonial destruction now doing some real damage to others and themselves These poems never make excuses but do what the best poems dare to do—to bear witness, to say what few have courage to say, and ultimately, to understand This refusal to turn away is where the necessary work of healing begins, where we can gather those boys in a new kind of light, full of purpose and love ”

—Nickole Brown,

author of Sister & Fanny Says

The Last Saturday in America

Ray McManus

For fans of Americana music and a beer after mowing the lawn, The Last Saturday in America confronts the long shadow of Southern masculinity.

The Last Saturday in America is set in a nation on the precipice of great change. Through examinations of suburban neighbors, bullies, gun violence, and vasectomy appointments, Ray McManus draws a portrait of American masculinity in the face of political division, pandemic, and cultural warfare. McManus’s speaker is caught between the way he was raised and the future he wants to see for who he is raising. He can no longer rely on what he thought he knew, nor does he know what to do about it. The man rendered in these pages is a father, a son, a Southerner. And he is willing to burn it all down and start something new, only to see that the new start he is looking for has been with him the whole time.

MARCH 12, 2024

PAPERBACK, $16.00 979-8-88574-031-9

POETRY

5.5 x 8.5, 72 pages hubcity.org/saturday

Ray McManus is the author of four books of poetry: Punch. (winner of the 2015 Independent Publishers Book Award for Best Book of Poetry in North America), Red Dirt Jesus (selected by Alicia Ostriker for the Marick Press Poetry Prize 2011), and Driving through the country before you are born (winner of the South Carolina Book Prize in 2006), and a chapbook called Left Behind He is the co-editor for the anthology Found Anew with notable contributors with South Carolina ties. His poems have been published in numerous journals such as Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, and POETRY magazine. He lives in South Carolina where he teaches for USC Sumter and serves as the Writer in Residence for the Columbia Museum of Art

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Praise for Joy is the Justice We Give

Ourselves & J. Drew Lanham

“With his consistently engaging writing, keen eye, and generosity of spirit, Lanham is a writer to whom we should all listen closely. Lanham memorably, vibrantly shows how choosing joy is an act of resilience, courage, and power.”

—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“A deeply satisfying focus on birds and yet, in these pages, it is humankind that gets examined with candor and cunning. Lanham's essential convergences of lyric and inquisition prove a satisfying reward.”

—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonder

“A keen-eyed observer of human nature and greater-than-human Nature, he sings the necessary songs of our time. Birding and poetry are practices of attentiveness, and the attention Lanham’s given these poems will greatly reward any reader’s attention.

Lanham’s is a vision and voice I admire; I’m as grateful for this book, this field guide, as he is grateful for the wildness in the world.”

—Sean Hill, author of Dangerous Goods

“There's so much to admire here in the dense thicket of Drew Lanham's poems and lyric prose pieces he calls ‘field marks.’ We don't need a literary field guide to recognize such a rare bird singing among us.”

—John Lane, author of Neighborhood Hawks

“...thoughtful, sincere, wise, and beautiful.”

—Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk

Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves

J. Drew Lanham

From J. Drew Lanham, MacArthur "Genius" Grant Recipient and author of Sparrow Envy: A Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts, comes a sensuous new collection in his signature mix of poetry and prose.

In gorgeous and timely pieces, Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves is a lush journey into wildness and Black being Lanham notices nature through seasonal shifts, societal unrest, and deeply personal reflection and traces a path from bitter history to the present predicament Drawing canny connections between the precarity of nature and the long arm of racism, the collection offers reconciliation and eco-reparation as hopeful destinations from our current climate of division In Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves, Lanham mines the deep connection to ancestors through the living world and tunes his unique voice toward embracing the radical act of joy

APRIL 2, 2024

HARDCOVER, $17.00

979-8-88574-030-2

POETRY

5 x 8, 112 pages hubcity.org/joy

J. Drew Lanham is the author of Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts and The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature He has received a MacArthur "Genius" Grant as well as the Dan W Lufkin Conservation Award (National Audubon Society), the Rosa Parks and Grace Lee Boggs

Outstanding Service Award (North American Association for Environmental Education), and the E O Wilson Award for Outstanding Science in Biodiversity Conservation (Center for Biological Diversity) He served as the Poet Laureate of Edgefield, South Carolina in 2022 He is a bird watcher, poet, and Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University. He lives in Seneca, South Carolina.

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Praise for Bomb Island

“Stephen Hundley has summoned forth a world that achieves a sense of strangeness and wonder while creating characters who are unrelentingly human in their flaws and strengths. A remarkable novel by an immensely talented young writer.”

—Ron Rash, author of The Caretaker

“This is a wonderful novel—part coming of age, part family drama, part thriller—and beautifully imagined. Written with great care and precision, the characters come alive on the page in a world you won’t forget. Stephen Hundley is a writer to watch.”

—Chris Offutt, author of Code of the Hills

“A beautiful, intricate knot of a book.”

—Mesha Maren, author of Perpetual West

Bomb Island

Stephen Hundley

Part coming-of-age romance, part thriller, Bomb Island is a funny and fast-paced Southern summer novel exploring sub-culture communities, survival, and found family set on an island near an unexploded atomic bomb.

Summer is in full swing on Bomb Island, Georgia. Fifteenyear-old Fish lives in a commune on the three-mile stretch of sand with his chosen family: their “mother-sage” Whistle and her white tiger, Sugar, a young man named Reef, and an old man named Nutzo, who is still missing. Fish and Whistle spend the days leading tours in their glass bottom boat out to the barrier island’s namesake, an unexploded atomic bomb.

This is the summer when Fish meets Celia, the tattooed daughter of a troublesome local charter fisherman bent on exposing Whistle’s commune–and their illegal tiger. When a party at her dad’s place goes sour, Fish brings Celia back to Bomb Island in the hope that she’ll stay there with him. But they still can’t find Nutzo, the tiger’s behavior has become increasingly erratic, and everyone’s summer is about to take a strange, dark turn.

Narrated by an ensemble cast of uniquely independent outsiders who have chosen counter-culture lives informed by their desires and past traumas, Bomb Island takes a rollicking journey through the weirds and wilds of Coastal Georgia. Stephen Hundley has crafted a spirited, zany novel with a big heart that examines the strength it takes to live freely and without shame

MAY 7, 2024 HARDCOVER, $25.95 979-8-88574-025-8 FICTION

5.5 x 8.5, 220 pages hubcity.org/bombisland

Stephen Hundley is the author of The Aliens Will Come to Georgia First (University of North Georgia Press, 2023) and Bomb Island (Hub City Press, 2024) He is a fiction editor at Driftwood Press, a book review editor at the Southeast Review, and his stories and poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Cream City Review, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MA from Clemson, an MFA from the University of Mississippi, and is currently completing a PhD in English at Florida State University.

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An Interview with Minrose Gwin

How did you come to write this novel?

I’ve always been interested in a certain kind of person who is seductive and charismatic while also being amoral and predatory. Such people can cause tremendous damage, personally and sometimes on a larger scale. They have learned how to manipulate people. This skill not only can be very profitable financially to them, but they thrive on the sense of the power it gives them.

Additionally, I’ve always been interested in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States It was a time of great struggle and hardship for members of the Black community, especially in the South It was also a time of struggle and enormous prejudice against members of LGBTQ+ communities. Rep. Joseph McCarthy and President Dwight Eisenhower, for example, linked homosexuality to communism. “Lavender Lads” were not allowed to work for the government or any government contracting agency or institution.

How did place inform your writing?

One of my mother’s best friends in high school, in what was then the small town of Tupelo, Mississippi, was a gay young man named David Baker In fact, David, my mother, and another friend rode out the historic and deadly tornado of 1936, which is the subject of my second novel, Promise, at my mother’s house when they were sixteen years old. My mother had broken her shoulder, and the two young men were delivering her homework assignments when the tornado barreled through town. I interviewed David in 2016 as part of my research on the tornado, which is still considered the fourth most deadly in the history of this country. He told me about his family cat named Minerva, who survived the storm He was in his nineties then and died before Promise was published.

David lived in the same house all his life, just behind the First Presbyterian Church. He spent a good bit of time in New Orleans and ran in the same circles as Tennessee Williams He was a spicy yet genial man, an incredible storyteller who participated in the arts scene in Tupelo Even in old age, David made you laugh In his adulthood, David employed a number of what people in the town called “house boys,” who lived in his home. One in particular was a shady guy, who was arrested for the murder of another man in some low-rent apartments in downtown Tupelo.

My biological father left my mother and me around the time of my birth, and my mother’s second marriage ended in the tragedy of her mental illness, bitterness on both sides of the union, and her death. Although David and my mother grew apart in adulthood, probably because of societal pressures, I sometimes think they would have made a wonderful family for a child like me Such a selfish fantasy!

Beautiful Dreamers

Minrose Gwin

It’s 1953 when Memory Feather and her mother, Virginia, are welcomed back home to the Mississippi Gulf Coast community of Belle Cote by Virginia’s childhood friend Mac McFadden, whose verve and energy buoy the recently divorced Virginia to embrace this new chapter.

Memory (“Mem”) is not like other girls: she is attune to the voices of plants and animals, and is missing two fingers on her left hand The three of them knit their lives together and become a close, though unconventional, family.

While Mac’s wealth, brains, and good humor have allowed him to carve out a niche in Belle Cote, his position as a gay man active in the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement exposes him to censure, harassment, and even brutality. When the unscrupulous and charismatic Tony Amato arrives in Belle Cote as Mac’s “guest,” he sets in motion a series of events that will shatter familial bonds and forever change Mem’s life An adult Mem recounts the story of the scars Tony left on her teenage years, confronting her own role in the disastrous events of that final summer.

For fans of Jill McCorkle and Silas House, Beautiful Dreamers is Gwin’s finest work to date Sweeping, dramatic, and vividly rendered, it is a novel of innocence and betrayal, love and intolerance, and the care and honesty we owe the families we choose

AUGUST 27, 2024 HARDCOVER, $28 979-8-88574-036-4

FICTION

6 x 9, 304 pages hubcity.org/beautifuldreamers

Minrose Gwin is the award-winning author of the novels

The Queen of Palmyra, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award; Promise, which was shortlisted for the Willie Morris Award in Southern Literature; and The Accidentals, which received the 2020 Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters Award in Fiction. She has also published a memoir, Wishing for Snow, about the collision of poetry and psychosis in her mother’s life, and four books of literary and cultural criticism, most recently Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement. She was co-editor of The Literature of the American South, a Norton anthology, and The Southern Literary Journal.

Like the characters in her novels, Minrose Gwin is a native of Mississippi. She began her writing career as a journalist and later taught at universities across the country, most recently the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her partner, Ruth Salvaggio, and several unruly four-leggeds

For more information about Minrose’s memoir and novels, see minrosegwin com

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An Interview with Emilie Menzel

How did you decide on form, in creating a narrative prose poem?

The story of writing this book is largely one of a reckoning with poetic form In early drafts, I was writing poems with quite tight, controlled lineation I could hear the poem sonically unfolding, and I wanted to share that precise experience with the reader. So I kept returning to the form, poking at the form, pushing lines, tighter tighter, trying to shape the poem into a bell that, when struck, rang at the same pitch for everyone. Instead, in pursuit of such a high level of control, I was taking the same language and contorting it again and again and again, trying to squeeze something out of the dried lemon it had become.

The interim result was that the poems read as too serious, or uncertain, or incomplete, or largely the problem was that I was not writing at all because I could not allow messiness I had to learn how to allow messiness So I turned to fiction I had to create more generously, and in order to be more generous, more verbose, I wrote and did not delete my copious variations on a single phrase, I let ideas that seemed initially silly stay, I let my philosophical thought experiments stay, I pushed ideas together that I would not have otherwise, I let my sense of humor take up space, and I did not worry about writing a poetic enough poem Prose allowed me meandering, freedom to let language run, and brave creation I was more lyrical, more generative, and more confident in prose.

What drew you to rabbits in particular?

I have always written about animals, through animal scenes. My father and grandfather are both animal behavioralists, and so I learned early to pay attention to creatures in a rather focused, thoughtful, and precise way I have been accidentally writing poems about rabbits in particular for about ten years now I do not especially love rabbits or identify with rabbits, though they are certainly beautiful, and through their appearances in my poems I have come to love them. It was really by accident that this collection came to be centered on rabbits I kept noticing them and so write of them, or they noticed me, and then friends began to send me pictures of all rabbits they saw, and then seeing a rabbit became an event, then an encounter. Many animals or people began to feel rabbit in one way or another. And then the rabbit as a fixation became a topic in and of itself. And so I am grateful to the rabbits that have appeared, that continue to appear, in my writing. It is rather a gift to have a decades long animal fixation; the creature’s meaning continues to shift as a symbol in my life There is a cycle of play to it; I write rabbit myths, the rabbits continue to appear, I attach meaning to my world through rabbits, my world changes as I age, and so the rabbits change, the myths adapt.

Fairytales and fables come from the shared imagination, and you write from such a visual place. Can you tell us some of your (visual and other) artistic influences while writing this book?

Kara Walker, Kiki Smith, Louise Bourgeois, Edward Gorey, Renee Gladman, Emily Dickinson’s envelopes, Lisbeth Zwerger, Martha Graham, Vaslav Nijinsky, Javier Téllez, Davood Koochaki, Graciela Iturbide, Lorna Simpson, Francesca Woodman, Vivian Maier, Violeta Lópiz, Monika Vaicenaviciene, Issa Watanabe, Carl Larsson, Beatrix Potter, Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi, Jackie Morris, Joanna Concejo, Ellen Gallagher, YunKyung Jeong, Kay Nielsen, Henry Darger, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, Beatrice Alemagna, Hilma Af Klint, Ian Felice, Bill Traylor, Peter Sis, Alexander Calder, Cy Twombly, Bianca Stone, Sarah Jarrett, Alois Cariget, Leonora Carrington, Etel Adnan, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Nahid Kazemi, Alexis Callender, Allison Janae Hamilton

The Girl Who Became a Rabbit

Emilie Menzel

The Girl Who Became a Rabbit, is a book-length lyric, a dark, ruminative poem that pushes the limits of the prose-poetic form to explore how the body carries and shapes grief and what it means to tell a story.

Examining reclaimed narratives of embodiment, gentle hauntings, and fables of the body, Menzel approaches the body as a home we consciously build, spinning myths and fairytales as ways to rewrite the body’s history

In the spirit of Maggie Nelson and Max Porter, Menzel’s writing is wild, lush, recursive, and intentionally messy. A mesmerizing and unique debut, The Girl Who Became a Rabbit intersects fable and trauma, femininity and creatureliness, and imagines the transformation of the body, perhaps, into language.

SEPTEMBER 10, 2024

PAPERBACK, $16 979-8-88574-037-1

POETRY

5.5 x 7.5, 82 pages hubcity.org/rabbit

Emilie Menzel’s poetry hybridities have garnered such honors as the New Southern Voices Poetry Prize (selected by Molly McCully Brown), the Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award in Poetry (selected by Diana Khoi Nguyen), and the Cara Parravani Memorial Award in Fiction (selected by Leigh Newman), and feature in such journals as the Bennington Review, Copper Nickel, and The Offing, among others She holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and serves as an editor and librarian for The Seventh Wave community Raised on barefoot Georgia summers, they now live in Durham, North Carolina and online at emiliemenzel.com.

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Emilie Menzel is the winner of the 2023 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize, selected by Molly McCully Brown

An Interview with Neesha Powell-Ingabire

What inspired you to write a memoir?

Whenever I write, I engage in an act that could have gotten my enslaved West African ancestors strung up a tree. I view my writing as inherently subversive. I write myself into history hoping my life might mean something to someone else, despite society perpetually pigeonholing me as the oversexed Jezebel, the subservient Mammy, or the angry Sapphire I write because history is dearth of multidimensional images of Black women, girls, and queer and trans people.

Which writers inspired you? How does place and home fit into their work and yours?

In fall 2019, I entered a MFA in Creative Writing program to get the push I needed to write a book-length manuscript. I knew I wanted to write a thesis illuminating my own and others’ lived experiences navigating a world where we are routinely perceived as intrinsically less than. During the program, I discovered and rediscovered autobiographical writings from authors such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Carmen Maria Machado, and Alice Walker

These writers contextualize their personal history as it relates to the collective history of a place or peoples to which they belong. Their work served as models for my thesis, an essay collection that evolved into my debut book, Come By Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia’s Geechee Coast I classify this book as “autohistory” to describe how it strives to examine the intersections between the history of the place I call “home” and my personal history, and to reflect on how these histories shape my present. The praxis of merging autobiography and history enables writers to explore and explain how we are shaped by our individual and collective past. Since history is typically recorded by the most privileged within society, who also have the most access to publishing self-writing (autobiographies, memoirs, personal essays, diaries, and journals), Black, brown, LGBTQIA+, and disabled people sharing our stories carries the potential of self-transformation

How did you research your hometown while working on the essays for your book?

I took several trips back home to coastal Georgia the place I once ran from because it was “backwards” and “country” to research and experience the region’s indigenous Gullah Geechee culture formed by the descendants of enslaved West Africans. I also worked with the manager of the Brunswick Library to locate newspaper archives of largely forgotten history. Over four years, I pieced together a collective story of Black resistance in the midst of brutal oppression along Georgia’s coast and acquired a new pride in my ancestral home I immersed myself in the past to reckon with the present and future in the hopes of healing generational wounds

Come By Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia’s Geechee Coast Neesha Powell-Ingabire

In this powerful debut, Powell-Ingabire chips away at coastal Georgia’s facade of beaches and golden marshes to recover undertold Black history alongside personal and family stories.

In May of 2020, Neesha Powell-Ingabire’s hometown became infamous after a viral video spread of white vigilantes killing a Black man named Ahmaud Arbery. The small coastal city of Brunswick, Georgia became synonymous with this tragedy, which, along with the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, spurred an international movement that summer to end white supremacy.

Neesha Powell-Ingabire, a millennial journalist, essayist, and organizer, grew up in Brunswick feeling alienated as a Black, queer, and disabled girl in a fraught racial and political environment Come By Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia’s Geechee Coast traces the genealogy of systemic racial violence while paying homage to the area’s long history of Black resistance and culture keeping Powell-Ingabire probes her personal connection to past and present: the victorious campaign to remove Brunswick’s Confederate monument out of a public park; modern echoes of ancestral practices such as farming, fishing, and basket weaving; the fight for Geechee land in Sapelo Island; and the mass suicide of the Igbo people, who drowned themselves in Dunbar Creek rather than be enslaved

In Come By Here, Neesha Powell-Ingabire reckons with their home’s collective history and their own history as a truth-telling exercise in line with Audre Lorde’s advice: “It is better to speak ”

SEPTEMBER 24, 2024 PAPERBACK, $17.95 979-8-88574-038-8 NONFICTION

5.5 x 8.5, 224 pages hubcity.org/comebyhere

Neesha Powell-Ingabire (she/they) is a coastal Georgia-born-and-raised movement journalist, essayist, community & cultural organizer, resource mobilizer, cat parent, spouse, and auntie living in Atlanta/occupied Muscogee territory She reports on the justice movements of the Black, trans, queer, and Southern communities to which she belongs and writes essays to recover her own history and the histories of her ancestors and their ancestral homes. Neesha’s writings have been published in various online and print publications, including Harper’s Bazaar, the Oxford American, Scalawag, and VICE. She recently graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Georgia College Learn more about Neesha's work at neeshawrites.com.

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A Note from Grey Wolfe LaJoie

“I grew up in a family plagued by addiction, poverty, criminality, and mental illness. Perhaps as a result of this, I am deeply concerned with interrogating the means by which our collective judgements cultural, legal, intellectual and moral dictate the value, or lack thereof, as perceived in others and ourselves. I am interested shame, in other words, in the way shame can turn into desperate avoidance, into violence, and consequently self-perpetuate. These stories ultimately arise out of that interest. They are both an effort to understand how we impose this cycle upon ourselves, and how society imposes it upon us.

I’m very interested in what it is, or who it is, that we assign to the shadows It is people, of course, societies, who do this assigning—and the unthinking impulses and attitudes born out of our cultural inertia can obstruct, sometimes, even our most careful seeking Because of a person’s identity, because of their ability or their station, assumptions are made about their value—their moral worth—and the result is not simply that they are seen as inferior; in the mind of another, this person sits in the negative space, society’s negative space unseen, and without meaning an absence, a zero. But the person that sleeps out on the street, or in the prison, or the slum the one who is believed to have nothing to say, nothing to contribute, merely because his articulation is disregarded and deterred this person in fact contains universes, libraries, infinite worlds of truth and beauty, which nowhere else exist.

Even worse, so many will dishonor this inside themselves discouraged from speaking, discouraged from acting, and convinced by the world that their agency is poisonous, they sit and they negate their very being Within that context, this book is something else as well: it is an exercise in permission-giving, in audacity, in embracing the bizarre and carnivalesque characters, voices, settings, and acts, which, as a result of the bent and haunted scenes that raised me, reside still deep within me and—as a result—these stories are an attempt to break that selfrepressing shame-cycle.”

Little Ones

Grey Wolfe LaJoie

A collection of fiction and graphic ephemera, Little Ones plays in a space of shadows and in-betweens.

Informed by Appalachian experience and traditions of Southern storytelling, these awardwinning stories are populated by the world’s dispossessed, disturbed, and disregarded: the quiet interior life of a passed-over laborer, the bedtime story a goose tells a snake about a boy named Grey, moments of a road-killed raccoon's afterlife, advice to the children of a future apocalypse.

These mischievous polyvocal tales play in a space of shadows and in-betweens. Little Ones is an exercise in audacity, in embracing the bizarre and carnivalesque within us. Grey Wolfe LaJoie employs uncanny wit and deep empathy to explore the way shame can turn into desperate violence, and to shed light on the smallest among us.

OCTOBER 8, 2024

PAPERBACK, $16.95 979-8-8857-4-039-5 FICTION

5.5 x 8.5, 232 pages hubcity.org/littleones

Born in Western North Carolina, Grey Wolfe LaJoie’s writing has been featured in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Threepenny Review, Crazyhorse, Shenandoah, Copper Nickel, the 2024 Pushcart Prize Anthology, and the 2023 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. They hold an MFA from the University of Alabama, and currently work for Auburn University’s Alabama Prison Arts & Education Project organizing and teaching creative writing classes in correctional facilities throughout the state They currently reside in Birmingham, AL.

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Spartanburg’s Historic Black Neighborhoods of North Dean Street, Gas Bottom, and Back of the College

Brenda Lee Pryce, Jim Neighbors, and Betsy Wakefield Teter

New neighborhoods began emerging north of Main Street in Spartanburg, South Carolina in the 1870s as emancipated Black men and women spent their hard-won post-slavery wages to purchase lots and build homes.

As the decades rolled by, they and their descendants established a string of neighborhoods encompassing hundreds of houses, stretching from modern day Barnet Park to the edge of Spartanburg Regional Medical Center.

The forthcoming book North of Main is the story of how this district rose and how it disappeared. In its pages, meet the pioneering Black men and women who lived and worked in these early neighborhoods: clergymen, educators, newsmen, artisans, attorneys, physicians, activists, musicians, caregivers, and more. In the face of frequent oppression, they laid a strong foundation for those who followed them.

OCTOBER 22, 2024 HARDCOVER, $22.95 979-8-88574-040-1

NONFICTION

8 x 10, 200 pages, full color hubcity.org/nom

Dr. Jim Neighbors teaches ethnic literature written in the U.S. at Wofford College and co-coordinates the African/African American Studies Program He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin at Madison

Brenda Lee Pryce is the co-author of South of Main (Hub City Press, 2005) She served as the first Black female state legislator in South Carolina, received an honorary doctorate in humanities from Wofford College in 2023, and is a founding member of the Spartanburg African American Heritage and Culture Committee.

A former journalist at four newspapers in the Carolinas, Betsy Wakefield Teter served as executive director of the Hub City Writers Project and director of Hub City Press for 22 years. She edited Textile Town (Hub City, 2002) and numerous other Hub City titles.

The history of the place they built is extraordinary in its demonstration of the heroism, courage, determination, and pride of Black citizens of Spartanburg who built dynamic and historically significant neighborhoods in treacherous times.

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Gravy Quarterly

A magazine by the Southern Foodways Alliance that documents, studies, and explores the diverse food cultures of the changing American South

Gravy is the journal and podcast duo of original narratives that are fresh, unexpected, and thoughtprovoking, created by the Southern Foodways Alliance in Oxford, Mississippi. Each year, Gravy supports the work of over 100 writers, illustrators, and photographers. The winter 2022 issue is the first issue of the quarterly magazine distributed by Hub City Press, in partnership with SFA.

Gravy was named the 2015 Publication of the Year by the James Beard Foundation and has received multiple nominations for other awards between 2016 and 2020, from humor writing to the MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. Notable contributors include Silas House, Janisse Ray, Randall Kenan, Monique Truong, Caleb Johnson, Chris Offutt, Latria Graham, and Imani Perry, among others.

FEATURES

Gravy tells stories about the changing American South Published by the Southern Foodways Alliance, the quarterly journal shares original narratives that are fresh, unexpected, and thoughtprovoking Each year, Gravy supports the work of over 100 writers, illustrators, and photographers in the South and beyond The organization shares oral histories, produces films and podcasts, publishes great writing, sponsors scholarship, mentors students, and stages events that serve as progressive and inclusive catalysts for the greater South.

PAPERBACK

FOOD WRITING / PHOTOGRAPHY

$12 per issue / $50 yearly subscription

7.5 x 10.5

hubcity.org/books/gravy