Florida Book Club

Ariel Francisco's new bilingual poetry collection (Spanish translations by the poet's father!) ruminates on subjects familiar to anyone who's worried at all about Florida's future: development, sea level rise, "resilience", et al. But it's also kind of hopeful, as we discuss with him today. And there are lots of ocean critters, a motif it shares with Ariel's previous collection A Sinking Ship Is Still a Ship, which we discussed with him in Season 9.

In this week's episode, we catch up with Shane Hinton, author of Pinkies and Radio Dark, and editor of We Can't Help It If We're From Florida, ahead of his keynote speech at the Florida College English Assocation conference later this month. He's got a new novel-in-stories (or is it a short story collection?) coming out later in 2025, which he'll preview for us!

A lot of Florida's boutique resorts, lodges, beach motels, and villas have some pretty intriguing stories to tell! Poynter Institute director of craft and local news Kristen Hare joins us to discuss her new book, the not-quite-history-not-quite-travel-guide Hotels, Motels, and Inns of Florida, which brings these stories to light and will definitely give Floridians some staycation ideas

Darcy Greco's novel of addiction, family dysfunction, and despair is saved from bleakness by her resilient and optimistic narrator. Darcy joins us today to discuss what it was like inhabiting this character's dark life during the composition of the novel, why fiction is preferable to memoir as a medium, and how being a northern transplant to Tampa inspired her, to a degree.

The Storm is an important literary document in Florida's history. It's also a compelling storm story (if anyone still wants to read one after 2024). Keith Huneycutt joins us again to talk about the newly-published edition from the University Press of Florida, how we can say with near-certainty who wrote it, and why author Ellen Brown Anderson's legacy matters historically.

If a lurid story of PTA drama, fundraising rivalries, Ponzi schemes, and adults acting less mature than their kids sounds fun to you, you will love Asha Elias' novel Pink Glass Houses! Asha joins us this episode to talk about her creative process and more generally about public school, PTA fundraising in Miami, and south Florida literary vibes.

Doug Alderson, author of Encounters with Florida's Endangered Wildlife, joins us to kick off Season 11, discussing his work as a steward and advocate for Florida's most vulnerable (and breathtaking) natural spaces. (There's also a lot of Tallahassee-area shout outs, both in the book and in our conversation!)

Laura van den Berg's new novel State of Paradise gave me serious Franz Kafka and David Lynch vibes. It contains some of the weirdest evocations of Florida I've ever encountered, and that's saying a lot. I'm not sure we even touched on half of what this book contains, thematically, in this great conversation to wrap up season 10!

Fans of climate-change poetry and the struggles most people endure under late-stage capitalism in Florida will love Alex Gurtis' When the Ocean Comes to Me. And if you aren't, but you are into imagism, haiku, and/or prose poetry, you will still love our conversation about his new chapbook from Bottlecap Press.

Leaving Florida after you've built a huge legacy with a project like O, Miami must be hard. We welcome back P. Scott Cunningham to talk about relocating to Illinois, how O, Miami will carry on, some rising South Florida authors, and the strange state Florida literary education currently finds itself in.