Through a series of short memoirs, Laura Valeri’s After Life as a Human visits Dog Island, a remote, amenity-deprived, hurricane-prone islet where pelicans rule, residents are resourceful, and human ambition is suspect. With uncanny observation and lyrical reflection, these essays explore the persistence, fragility, and connectedness of life on the island and off. Valeri masterfully […]
Event starts Monday, November 16 at 6 p.m. The Year of Dangerous Days: Riots, Refugees, and Cocaine in Miami 1980 is Nicolas Griffin’s story of the rise and fall of one of America's most popular destination cities, that was not so long ago rife with police brutality, an out-of-control drug epidemic, and a bulging refugee […]
Yanela McLeod's The Miami Times and the Fight for Equality: Race, Sport, and the Black Press, 1948-1958 highlights the 1949 lawsuit challenging segregation on the city's public golf course brought by The Miami Times, the number one Black-owned newspaper in the country. It is but one example of the paper's commitment to desegregation, and part of the historical […]
New York Times bestselling author Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, follows the true story of the Galvins, a large family upended by acute schizophrenia in the 1960s and ’70s. At the time, the family hid its anguish and trauma behind a shiny veneer of all-American normalcy, but beyond […]
E. J. Koh was 15 when her mother returned to South Korea and left her behind in California. In her memoir The Magical Language of Others, she grapples with forgiveness, reconciliation, and legacy as she reads her mother's letters seeking absolution and love. Prize-winning poet Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s Children of the Land relays his experiences […]
The collection of personal essays in award-winning poet Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments – lushly illustrated by Fumi Nakamura – together form an enchanting and introspective narrative of a life’s journey buoyed by connection to animals and earth. Sponsored by:
Fellow poet-memoirists sit down to talk about their latest work. In What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, Mark Doty effortlessly blends biography, criticism, and memoir in what the New York Times described as “an incisive, personal meditation” on the Leaves of Grass author. In her collection Rocket Fantastic, Gabrielle Calvocoressi – senior […]
Gary Monroe's Alfred Hair: Heart of the Highwaymen is a long-awaited testament to the life and work of the man and artist who was the driving force of the Florida Highwaymen, a group of young Black artists who painted their way out of the despair awaiting them in the citrus groves and packing houses of […]
In Florida's Healing Waters: Gilded Age Mineral Springs, Seaside Resorts, and Health Spas, Rick Kilby explores the Victorian belief that water promoted healing and rehabilitation, and a little-known time in Florida history – well before South Beach became an international getaway for cocktails and clubbing – when tourists poured into the state in search of […]
Event starts Sunday, November 15 at 5:30 p.m. In 2016, Kent Russell – restless and thirsting for adventure – embarked on an odyssey-like trek throughout Florida, an experience he wryly chronicled across the pages of In the Land of Good Living: A Journey to the Heart of Florida, a memoir that’s equal parts Jack Kerouac, […]
In Never Alone: Prison, Politics, and My People, Natan Sharansky, who spent nine years in prison in the Soviet Union for his activities as a “Refusenik” – a Jewish dissident denied permission to emigrate to Israel – reveals how his time in jail, much of it in harsh solitary confinement, prepared him for what became […]
Through dozens of black-and-white images, photographer Gary Monroe takes readers on a time-traveling journey to an oft-forgotten moment in Miami Beach history: when it was a retirement haven for American Jews. The Last Resort: Jewish South Beach, 1977-1986 scratches at Miami’s present-day persona as a cosmopolitan global destination to reveal an earlier iteration, fondly recalling […]