"Miss Southeast is a book about the inextricable relationship between our internal and external landscapes, about intimacy, power, privilege, and place. It's also, fundamentally, a book about the ways we come to know ourselves: complicated, painful, joyful, and profoundly surprising. This collection was both a pleasure and an education, and I felt recognized inside of it. I'd follow this voice anywhere."
—Molly McCully Brown, author of Places I've Taken My Body
"A gorgeous memoir-in-essays and a coming-of-age, Rogers situates her story in personal and global history, the broader shift of queer consciousness and the intimacy of private connections. In a sweeping and impressive range of focus, she wrestles with dynamics of power and performance, love and desire, region and religion, friendship and family, secrecy and exposure. An accomplished musician, poet, and scholar, this book heralds Rogers's gifted voice in the world of essays." —Sarah Gerard, author of Sunshine State
MISS SOUTHEAST
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.
“With powerful, image-driven prose, Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers offers us an interrogation of home and belonging, and the many ways in which we seek them. Like all the best essay collections, I didn’t feel this was a writer trying to teach me a lesson, to extol knowledge or answers upon her readers; instead, this is a writer who has complex questions of selfhood and society and explores them openly on the page.” —Melissa Faliveno, author of Tomboyland: Essays