About The Festival

Southern Gothic is where beauty and unease sit side by side: haunted houses, complicated families, old secrets, strange faith, hard history, and the humor and music that survive it.

Traditionally, Southern Gothic refers to a literary tradition associated with writers such as William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty. Their work used the strange, grotesque, disturbing, and sometimes absurd to explore the contradictions of Southern life—race and class, violence and poverty, religious fervor, isolation, family and community, and the weight of the past. Complicated, unsettling, and often darkly funny, Southern Gothic has deep roots in the literature and history of the South.

The Southern Gothic Festival honors that tradition while asking what happens when the Southern and the Gothic collide in the contemporary South—a place still intriguing, creative, complicated, and sometimes deeply troubling, where dark history continues to shape the present even as new generations reconsider, challenge, and reinvent Southern stories. We begin with literature, including contemporary Southern Gothic, horror, Southern noir, grit lit, and other writing that ventures into the South’s darker corners, but we look beyond fiction as well, exploring true crime, folklore, ghost stories, local history, music, and the stories—documented, remembered, embellished, or imagined—that become part of a place. 

Each year, the festival stretches those boundaries a little further, bringing together writers, historians, storytellers, musicians, podcasters, scholars, and others to consider what Southern Gothic has been, what it is becoming, and why the strange relationship between the South and the Gothic continues to intrigue us.