The Winter 2022 issue of Gravy culminates a year's explorations of natural, built, and imagined environments. Essays, verse, and recipes consider the spaces we inhabit and how we move through them, and the ways in which they may nourish and deprive.
These reflections begin along the Texas Gulf Coast, where journalist Kayla Stewart brings us on board a boat helmed by the only Black commercial fisherman in the region, asking questions about access and equity. Scholar and organizer John Simpkins considers the failures and potentials of Southern cities. On an urban farm in Memphis, writer Faron Levesque reveals glimpses of a city and community often unseen. Meanwhile, sociologist and writer Brian Foster centers movement, flux, and transformation, following bodies from a grandmother's rural kitchen to a metropolitan dance studio. Oral historian Annemarie Anderson takes us behind the scenes of a COVID-19 project, and filmmaker Zaire Love to an equine film shoot with chef and activist Bill Smith. Poetry from Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Marlanda Dekine speak to place and identity. Finally, bartenders and chefs share recipes from the 2021 Fall Southern Foodways Symposium to sustain us in the new year.