Readings From Salvation South

Read these poems by KB Ballentine at Salvation South: “Thunder Argues With the Heat.” Originally published September 30, 2025.

Chattanooga, Tennessee, poet KB Ballentine reads two new works: “Late August” and “Stop the Moment.”

KB Ballentine began writing poetry so she could better understand how to teach it to her high school students. Since then she has been drawn to the light and spirit of poetry and has left that ill-fated novel in the bottom drawer—where it belongs!

Read these poems by Kari Gunter-Seymour at Salvation South: “The Twangs I Speak, the Myths I Favor.” Originally published September 30, 2026..

The former Ohio Poet Laureate reads four new poems: “Meditation on the Transition of All Things Into Memory,” “All of This and Little Else,” “The Nuts (And Bolts) of Self-Reflection,” and “When Honky-Tonk Boys Return Home From College After Their First Semester.”

Kari Gunter-Seymour is a recipient of an IPPY Bronze, NYC Big Book, Feathered Quill, and Next Generation Indie Finalist Book award. Her newest collection, All That Teethes Within, is forthcoming Fall 2026 from University of Kentucky Press. Her work has been featured in World Literature Today, American Book Review, Rattle, About Place Journal, Poem-a-Day, Katie Couric's Wake Up Call and The New York Times.

Salvation South editor Chuck Reece reflects on the life of the late Dolly Parton.

Tennessee poet Chris Wood reads four new works: "Sitting in the Grandstand,” “The Choir of Summer," “Broken Edge of Summer," and “After the Funeral.”

A Kentucky native now living in Tennessee, Chris Wood is the author of the chapbook Yesterday Echoes, and her work appears in several publications, including January House Literary Journal, Heart of Flesh, and Women Speak: Volume Ten (Women of Appalachia Project, 2025). When not writing, she serves as a director in operations services for a real-estate investment trust and enjoys life with her husband and their pack of fur-babies.

A poem by New Orleans writer Christopher Louis Romaguera: from a grandfather’s Havana to the riptide of Miami to New Orleans, one family keeps learning the arithmetic of leaving.

Born in Hialeah, Florida, and a graduate of Florida International University in Miami and the University of New Orleans, Christopher Louis Romaguera is a Cuban-American writer living in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is a VONA alum, was a 2023 Periplus Fellow, a monthly columnist at The Ploughshares Blog and was the poetry editor at Peauxdunque Review. Romaguera’s translation of Hernán Lara Zavala’s novel, Charras: A True Novel of the Assassination That Roiled the Yucatan, was published by UNO Press in 2025.

A poet uses a child’s paintbrush to coax a single, fist-sized lemon from an indoor tree.

Hear Ilyse Simon read her poem “The Tender.”

Ilyse Simon saw the total eclipse in 2024 and began to write on the back of a crumpled napkin while stuck in traffic. She lived in Virginia for over a decade, where she created the Happy Belly Deli and managed the Roanoke Natural Foods Co-Op. Now, she is a nutrition therapist by day, burgeoning writer by night, and a mom all the time. She writes because therapy is too expensive. Her poetry has been in Chronogram, Lightwood Journal, WildSound, Rabbitbrush Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Critica.

What a family says, and cannot say, when it lays down one of its own.

Hear Samuel Collins Hicks read his poem “A Farmer’s Funeral.”

Samuel Collins Hicks is a journalist, actor, and cat lover in Lexington, Kentucky. He is a mental-illness and alcohol-recovery advocate, who lives with Bipolar II disorder and is celebrating five years of sobriety.

A neighbor called the city on their April-in-Mississippi yard. They suspected a vendetta, either political or apian.

Kendall Dunkelberg directs the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Mississippi University for Women, where he also directs the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium and edits Poetry South magazine. He has published four collections of poetry: Landscapes and Architectures, Time Capsules, Barrier Island Suite, and Tree Fall With Birdsong, as well as the creative writing textbook, A Writer’s Craft: Multi-Genre Creative Writing.

Three poems from Julie Hensley’s Bent Cedar Mountain, where coal country’s debts come due in parking lots and Easter kitchens.

Julie Hensley is a core faculty member of the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University, where she teaches both fiction and poetry. She is the author of several books, including Viable, Landfall: A Ring of Stories, Five Oaks, and Bent Cedar Mountain. South Arts selected her as its 2026 Literary Fellow for the state of Kentucky.

The love never shrinks. Only the need does — and learning to tell the two apart may be the last work of motherhood.

Diana Keough is an award-winning journalist and professor of journalism at the University of Georgia. She is the creator of Not From a Nice Family, a memoir podcast that will be released by Audible on September 17, 2026.