A collection of narrative essays on femininity, sexuality, community, and belonging

Miss Southeast explores the strange, often contradictory cultural circumstances of being queer and female in the American South and beyond. Born and raised in North Carolina, the youngest in a family of precocious daughters, Rogers spends her teenage years as a half-closeted lesbian desperate to escape the South, convinced the rest of the United States must be “more enlightened than our cow-dotted corner of the county.”

Adulthood takes Rogers to Ohio, New York, Louisiana, Arkansas, Washington, DC, and China, but each essay finds her reckoning with participation in and resistance to rigid cultural institutions—whether a coming-out story set at a high school beauty pageant or a meditation on swimming pools as emblems of racial divides across the South. In lyric prose enlivened by a poet’s sense of musicality, Miss Southeast considers how both place and our layered identities shape our sense of belonging.

ELIZABETH LINDSEY ROGERS is the author of the poetry collections The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons and Chord Box. Her essays have appeared in Missouri Review, The Rumpus, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best American Travel Writing, and elsewhere. Born and raised in North Carolina, she is an assistant professor at Oberlin College and leads the Writers in the Schools program in Oberlin, Ohio.

Introduction
A Bearing
Miss Southeast
Dyke Litany
Shame
Someone Older
One Person Means Alone
Public Swim
Wound Care
The Year on Desire
Encumber: A Brief History
Ear Training
The Mothers
Acknowledgements