SouthTalks: The Laborer is Worth of Their Hire: Stories & Sounds of Southern Solidarity

Overview

In his debut poetry collection, Work Lunch, Alabama poet and musician Lee Bains draws on his own experience at the intersection of work and food—the daily ritual of a workday lunch. In this SouthTalk, Bains will explore the multifaceted and often contradictory nature of southern culture and values through the lens of labor and food. Poems and songs will glimpse sandwiches under shade trees, tables full of boisterous coworkers discussing barbecue, and reflective moments at meat-and-threes, all fertile ground for investigating Bains’s home places of Birmingham, Alabama, and Atlanta, Georgia, the systems of power that shape life there, and the ways in which ordinary people survive, connect, and fight back.

Lee Bains is a poet and musician from Birmingham, Alabama, whose four albums center on what Rolling Stoneonce called “southern gospel punk.” A cult songwriter forged in independent scenes, his work has carried him all over the US and Europe, and has led him to be a supporting musician for artists like Lonnie Holley, Moor Mother, and Algiers. Bains has lent his work to support striking coal miners, immigrants’ rights groups, abortion funds, and antiracism organizations.

Later in the day, join us at 4:30 p.m. for a craft talk with Lee Bains and Max Hipp at Exploradora Coffee (463 Ryland Way). Hipp is the author of the short story collection What Doesn’t Kill You Opens Your Heart, winner of the 2025 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for fiction. He teaches courses at the University of Mississippi on American literature, magical realism, and creative writing. He writes music with the bands E-meters and Mean Machine and plays unruly guitar with The Apostles and The Great Dying.

Both the SouthTalk and craft talk are made possible by a partnership between the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, the Department of English, and the Southern Foodways Alliance.