Southern Exposure is an award-winning print journal and magazine published by the Institute for Southern Studies, publisher of Facing South, from 1973 until 2011. Southern Exposure earned a national reputation and won several awards, including a National Magazine Award and two George Polk Awards, for its writing and investigative reporting on a broad range of political, economic, and cultural issues in the South.

Vol. 11 No. 4 - July/August 1983
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illustrations (scratch drawings) of two people next to each other

"Not No Easy Business:" Interviews with prostitutes

  • Letters From our Readers

    2

  • Readers Corner

    Making it in rural America, by Jonathan P. Sher

    3

  • Southern News Roundup

    Jesse Helms fans racehate fires; Ole Miss sings Dixie; exit tests for kids; income gap widens

    4

  • Voices of Our Neighbors

    Secret War, No More “Little Girl,” The Apartheid Bomb

    10

  • Facing South

    Okra: The Comic Vegetable, by Violet Moore

    12

  • Resources

    Ladyslipper; save your land; labor songs; and more

    13

  • Reviews

    Folk writing, modern mountains

    66

  • Voices From the Past

    American Heretic

    72

  • Trying to Make a Living

    Exploring the economics of prostitution, by Phaye Poliakoff

    14

  • Not No Easy Business

    Interview with a Virginia prostitute, by Sarah Wilkerson

    19

  • Poetry

    by Maxine Alexander

    24

  • What’s Happening in Atlanta

    The impact of the child murders, by Toni Cade Bambara

    25

  • Local Color

    Interviews with Mississippi folk artists, by William Ferris

    36

  • Retiree’s Lament

    Song, lyrics by Roy Greer, music by Joe Pfister

    44

  • Growing Up Southern and Sexy

    A reminiscence of teenage life in Alabama in the ’30s, by Marie Stokes Jemison

    45

  • Poetry

    by Beverly Burch

    50

  • To President Reagan

    A letter, by Mary Brinkmeyer

    51

  • Building a New World

    A century of black labor photographs, by Tom Beck

    52

  • A Case of Prejudice

    The execution of Maurice Mays and the Knoxville Race Riot of 1919, Zip John Egerton

    56
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