The Burnaway Reader is an annual print publication that features long-form essays, interviews, artist projects, and other stories related to the magazine’s three annual themes. After a brief period of print publishing from 2013-2014, Burnaway revived the Reader in 2019 with an ambitious new format and scope. Each year, the Burnaway Reader creates a physical record of the organization’s online publishing and provides an opportunity to commission ambitious new, print-exclusive projects.
Steeped in oral tradition, community narratives across time, and the avenues in which fiction becomes fact, the texts from the 2026 Reader MYTH expand on how historical belief and current events merge and are translated into contemporary archetypes for art and artists across the South and the Caribbean. Essays consider three themes that focus on characters and beings that lie parallel to landscapes and individual ecosystems, from the physical sensation of a haunting that translates to a ghostly artistic presentation to conceptual art that is playful and deceives initial perception. The artists, works, and practices found in this volume are larger-than-life, existing as variations from a stereotype and nuanced understandings of the Ghost, the Trickster, and the Siren.
Within this volume, writers speak in further detail on: a Japanese American artist in Kentucky who creates three-dimensional body sculptures; re-remembering a photograph from South Carolina that expands on memory as an active process, and aperture as critical in the region; the Black aural archive of 1970s and 1980s video works by Phillip Mallory Jones; a Durham-born, Miami-based artist who created and plays in a parafictional women’s basketball league, inspired by Ernie Barnes; the Jamaican myth of the River Mumma as explored through mixed media works; a Nashville monument that investigates restorative nostalgia; and a lens and text-based artist project by Houston-based artist Debra Barrera.
Existing between the space occupied by periodicals, academic journals, and art objects, MYTH covers thirteen states plus the Caribbean, and is carried by public and private universities, large-scale institutions, DIY spaces, private collectors, and a thoughtful, curious cultural audience.
Readers will go out the week of April 6. If you have questions or would like to stock MYTH, please email [email protected].
Previous editions of the Burnaway Reader are available for purchase in our Shop.
Current and former stockists of the Burnaway Reader include:
Atlanta Contemporary
Birmingham Museum of Art
Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center
Charis Books and More
The Concern Newsstand
For Keeps Bookstore
Mississippi Museum of Art
North Carolina Museum of Art
Ogden Museum of Southern Art
Secret Riso Club
Wendy’s Subway
Whitney Museum of American Art
Wexner Center for the Arts
Still from Philip Mallory Jones, Beyond the Mountains: More Mountains, 1975, video work.
Stills from America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.
Shohei Katayama, Hollow Pressure, 2025, copper, iron, oil, water, electromagnet, and PLA, 65 × 12 × 5 inches.
Leasho Johnson, With stony hearts or with a wound (Anansi#30), 2024, charcoal, distemper, watercolor, logwood dye, acrylic, casein, oil, oil stick, gold foil, and gesso on paper mounted on canvas, 7 ½ × 104 × 1 ¾ inches.
The making of Uncommon Routes (2024) basketball court in Legion Park, Miami, Florida.
Simone Leigh working in the studio adjacent to The Wilde Woman of Aiken.
The Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee.
Richard Nattoo, Gift of the Night, 2025, watercolor, water from Falling Edge Waterfall, Stony Hill, Jamaica, pen and ink on canvas, and various trimmings, 31 ½ × 31 ½ inches (80 x 80 cm).
Benjy Russell, Square sun, 2025, archival giclée print, 30 × 40 inches.
The making of Uncommon Routes (2024) basketball court in Legion Park, Miami, Florida.
Benjy Russell, Matrilineal lineage (my grandmother’s mother), 2025, archival photograph, 36 x 36 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Ọmọlará Williams McCallister, Fishers of Men, 2016, braided and knotted muslin scraps, size variable. Photograph by Chris Myers and image courtesy of the artist.
The Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee. Photograph by Leslie Rodriguez and courtesy of Centennial Park Conservancy, Nashville.
The making of Uncommon Routes (2024) basketball court in Legion Park, Miami, Florida. Photograph by and courtesy of Juan Luis Matos.
Still image from Ryann Sterling, Feeding The Consciousness, 2022, film, collage, and archival footage. Image courtesy of the artist.
Tevin Lewis. Image courtesy of the artist.
Tevin Lewis, Mystery Antenna Key, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist.
Najja Moon, Defense, 2021 – ongoing, mixed media drawing, part of The Huddle Is A Prayer Circle series, 8 1/2 x 11 inches. Photograph by and courtesy of Najja Moon.
James A. Palmer, The Wilde Woman of Aiken, from the “Aiken and Vicinity” series, 1882, albumen silver print from glass negative, 6 1/2 × 4 1/8 inches (16.5 × 10.5 cm). Purchase, Nancy Dunn Revocable Trust Gift, 2018. Photograph courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, New York.
Still from Tamika Galanis, Returning the Gaze: I ga gee you what you lookin’ for, 2018, digital video, 5:05 minutes. Film still by and courtesy of the artist.
Reagan Kemp, Duppy Know Who Fi Frighten, 2024, oil on canvas, 18 x 22 ½ inches. Photograph by and courtesy of the artist.
