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This Spring, the OA will focus on food.

Through fresh reporting, in-depth profiles, and daring personal essays, this issue will explore what we eat: people, industries, and tastes that both build and challenge our ideas of Southern food.

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Courtney Balestier

About

Courtney Balestier is a writer whose work focuses on the intersection of place and identity, particularly in her native Appalachia. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Joyland, The New Yorker online, Lucky Peach, and others. She is currently at work on her first novel, set in her home state of West Virginia.

Articles

Issue 84, Spring 2014

King of the Bean People

Some of his seeds are more than 150 years old—one goes back to the American Revolution. For the most part, they still grow as they always have.

By Courtney Balestier

Common Ground

By Courtney Balestier
Web Feature

A Dream about a Ghost Is Not a Nightmare

Growing up in West Virginia, I knew that “King Coal” was real even though I had no familial connection to the state’s mining industry.

By Courtney Balestier

STILL LIFE WITH CORNBREAD

By the time he got to England, family in tow, he found he missed Southern cooking: "And then, for the first time, it felt okay to explore. In London, cleaning up Southern food from the way it’s...

By Courtney Balestier