Gravy: Spring 2026

Guest edited by Sandra Beasley, the Spring 2026 issue of Gravy quarterly features contemporary Southern poets, who have played a central role in SFA’s programming for more than two decades.

Tomás Q. Morín’s “Magical Realism” is a bold, self-aware ode to lifting experience beyond the commodification of the everyday and into the sincerity of the sublime. (Plus, pan dulce. Plus, a dog.) Noreen Ocampo’s lush instincts for litany and lineation bring intimacy to small but nourishing gestures, while Jason McCall’s poem extends a broad wingspan over the landscape and history of Pensacola, Florida.

Julie Hensley’s poems operate on the stage of a marriage story. C.T. Salazar’s poem composes a promise, phrase by phrase, while Kwoya Fagin Maples’s poem channels Gullah Geechee ancestors. Rodrick Minor’s sequence, riffing on a sonnet crown, examines the life of enslaved chef James Hemings. Adrienne Su weighs the legacy of Teflon, and Hailey Leithauser relishes a sweet corn varietal.

Kevin Young brings us home with brilliant epistolary poems that invite two more Southern poets to the table—Sean Hill and Jake Adam York, both featured in SFA’s 2018 collection Vinegar & Char. These powerful poems are paired with illustrations that bring extraordinary energy to the page. In sharing their new work, poets teach us what it means to show up in this impossible time and keep going.

Cover by Simone Martin-Newberry.