Nobody’s Home: Modern Southern Folklore is an online anthology of creative nonfiction works about beliefs, myths, and narratives in Southern culture over the last fifty years, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Created in 2020, the anthology collects personal essays, memoirs, short articles, opinion pieces, and contemplative works about the ideas, experiences, and assumptions that have shaped life below the old Mason-Dixon Line since 1970. Access to Nobody’s Home is and will continue to be free, and while the project is intended for a general readership, it also has accompanying resources for teachers to use the works in their classrooms. The next Open Submissions Period for creative nonfiction begins on April 15, 2026 and ends on June 15. Accepted submissions from last year’s reading period were published in August 2025. 

For its initial compilation, Nobody’s Home had four reading periods for submissions during 2020 and 2021, and accepted works were then published in January, March, June, and September 2021. After the initial compilation of the anthology was complete, Foster’s attention shifted to promoting the works and to publishing the lesson plans that accompany each work. For writers and scholars who are still interested in contributing, submissions of reviews and interviews will be considered year-round. 

Nobody’s Home was created with the support of a Literary Arts Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts. The fellowship “recognizes artistic excellence as well as professional commitment and maturity. It is intended to contribute to the further development of the literary artist and the advancement of his or her professional career.”

To learn more about the project, you can read the works that have been published, read posts in the editor’s blog Groundwork or like the project’s Facebook page. The project’s Twitter/X account was deactivated on June 1, 2025.

a sampling of posts from Groundwork, the editor’s blog:

Hold Steady and Stick Together: A Rumination on School-Choice Vouchers
“Support for government-issued education vouchers varies widely in the South, depending upon one’s circumstances. “

A Road Trip, West: Alabama’s Black Belt
“Alabama’s Black Belt is the place that most Americans think of when they imagine either the Old South or the impoverished modern South.”

Car Trouble and Voodoo: A Rumination on Horror and the South
“So why would the rural South be a terrifying place? Because for more than two centuries, Southerners have given Americans, and people worldwide, reasons to be afraid.”

A Road Trip, Southwest: The Carolinas in Spring, Part Two
“Responding to people who say that America has become homogenized and now every place looks alike, the Texas writer Larry McMurtry remarked in his 2001 book Roads: no, it’s just that every interstate exit in America looks alike.”

A Road Trip, Northeast: The Carolinas in Spring, Part One
“Unlike other trips, when I could stick my preferred back roads, this time it would mean lots of interstate if I wanted to make some time and get where I needed to go: first Spartanburg, South Carolina in the Upstate, then Manteo, North Carolina in the Outer Banks, with the final destination being Norfolk, Virginia on the Chesapeake Bay.”

The Outro: There was never one South.
“Even for a subject that a person knows well, there is always more to learn. “