Katrina's America

Southern Cultures, the award-winning, peer-reviewed quarterly from UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South, encourages submissions from scholars, writers, and artists for a special issue, Katrina’s America, to be published Fall 2025. We will accept submissions for this issue through December 16, 2024.

Nearly twenty years ago, Hurricane Katrina sent a storm surge into the Gulf of Mexico. When the levee system surrounding metropolitan New Orleans collapsed, hundreds of people died, tens of thousands of people lost their homes, and years of suffering and struggle followed. At the time, many people understood Katrina as an unprecedented disaster, or a catastrophe that could only occur on the underprivileged margins of American wealth and power. From today’s vantage, however, Katrina no longer looks like an exception. The two decades since the flood have brought more water, fire, and pandemic, surging racist violence, widening economic inequality, and seemingly irreconcilable political conflict. The past two decades have brought, too, emboldened community organizing, ambitious visions for addressing the climate crisis, and other creative efforts to build a more humane future. In all of these domains, Katrina does not appear to be retreating into the past so much as resounding in the future. It is increasingly clear that we live, today, in Katrina’s America. 

In the Fall 2025 issue, Southern Cultures explores Katrina as augur and author of the twenty-first century United States. We seek scholarly articles, personal essays, interviews, photography, and art that make sense of Katrina’s significance, and how its meaning has changed over time. We understand Katrina as an acute event that took place in the summer of 2005 in the attics of the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans East, Chalmette, and other flooded neighborhoods. We also understand Katrina as an ongoing process that continues on the Gulf Coast, in the places displaced people went, in the halls of power in Baton Rouge and Washington, DC, and in politics and culture across the country and around the world. We are interested in submissions that map Katrina’s America at any or all of these local, national, and global scales. We especially seek submissions that are informed by the time that has passed since the flood.

Submissions can explore any topic or theme, and we welcome investigations of the region in the forms Southern Culturespublishes: scholarly articles, creative nonfiction, memoir (first-person or collective), interviews, surveys, photo and art essays, and shorter feature essays. 

Topics and questions to explore might include:

• “where are they now?”
• accounts of contemporary New Orleans, its suburbs, the Alabama and Mississippi coasts, and other flooded places
• evacuation, displacement, resettlement, and the ongoing Katrina diaspora
• gentrification, and the intersection of economic and environmental change
• infrastructure, and the relationships between structural inequality and the built environment
• racism, poverty, and the construction of vulnerability 
• the legacy of Katrina among volunteers, Teach for America alumni, and others who spent time in New Orleans after the flood and then left
• Katrina and charter schools, policing, public housing, public health, and other reform movements
• Katrina and disaster policy, insurance policy, water infrastructure, and climate adaptation
• Katrina and George W. Bush’s presidency, Barack Obama’s election, Black Lives Matter, the Confederate Monuments debate, the Green New Deal, the COVID-19 pandemic, and etc.
• Katrina and the ways people experience or imagine race, class, and the climate crisis
• the significance of popular culture in shaping Katrina’s meaning, and responses to Katrina in music and art
• reflections on iconic images of the disaster
• efforts to memorialize Katrina
• Katrina and the meanings of justice and community

As Southern Cultures publishes digital content, we encourage creativity in coordinating print and digital materials in submissions and ask that authors submit any potential video, audio, and interactive visual content along with their essay or artist’s statement. We encourage authors to gain familiarity with the tone, scope, and style of our journal before submitting. For full submissions guidelines, please click here.