Set in the imagined town of Honey, Mississippi, the women and girls in Exodus Oktavia Brownlow's stories move through generations of shared history—bound by the food they serve, the hymns they lift into the air, and the thick Southern heat that surrounds them. The land itself crackles with life: a mother's remedy sizzling on the stove, a rifle snapping in the woods, a bee humming its way home. Honey is a place where sweetness lingers, where sharpness hides beneath the surface, where people can be tender, sticky, and biting all at once.

When It Gets Cold in the South stretches across centuries—from the 1600s to today—following characters who balance inherited wisdom with their own visions for the future. From a daughter forging her own forms of selfcare, to a family caught between safety and salvation, to siblings united by their love of Thriller, to a young woman confronting the racism lurking in beauty pageants, these stories reveal a South that is both tender and fierce. This stunning debutintroduces a remarkable new literary talent. Through inventive structures, rhythmic dialogue, and richly sensory prose, Brownlow conjures a world alive with sound and texture—where you hear oil pop, feel the sky's cold settle in your core, and carry the South's heat and chill in your bones. Bold, vulnerable, and unforgettable, this collection marks the arrival of an extraordinary storyteller.