A sneaky daddy, a rescuer aunt, and a local woman who watches through the diner window turn into sharp looks at small-town Alabama life: a collection of three poems by Rachel Nix.

Rachel Nix is a queer writer and editor for Screen Door Review. Her own work has appeared in such journals as Sundog Lit, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and The West Review, among others. She resides in Northwest Alabama, where pine trees outnumber people rather nicely.

Watching a table of older friends across a restaurant, the author of Salvation South's monthly "Between Sundays" column, Diana Keough, gets a jolt of fear about where time is taking her—and wonders how to grow old with open hands instead of a clenched jaw.

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.

As our country prepares to mark 250 years, a son of Selma, Alabama, writer Tad Bartlett, audits the accounts his people kept in blood and cotton. He finds no entry that will ever balance the books.

Tad Bartlett was born in Ankara, Turkey; grew up in Selma, Alabama; and married into New Orleans, where he earned a J.D. from Tulane Law School and an MFA in fiction from the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans. His creative nonfiction received a nomination for the Pushcart Prize, and Best American Essays recognized it as “notable.” His nonfiction work has appeared in The Chautauqua Literary Journal, Salvation South, and Oxford American,among others.His fiction, also Pushcart-nominated, has appeared in Salvation South, Massachusetts Review, Carolina Quarterly, and other publications.

A poem by Lacy Snapp, read by the author.

Lacy Snapp is a poet, professor, and woodworking artist in East Tennessee where they plan university and community-based literary events. They serve as poetry co-editor of Appalachian Places and a board member of the Johnson City Poets Collective. Their first chapbook, Shadows on Wood (Finishing Line Press), was published in 2021. Snapp’s poetry, nonfiction, interviews, and book reviews appear in About Place Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Salvation South, Hunger Mountain Review, and Cutleaf Journal.