In David Hopen’s The Orchard, Orthodox Jewish high school student Aryeh moves with his family from Brooklyn’s Borough Park to the Miami suburbs and is plunged into a secularized world where everything he believes he knows of himself is threatened. Irresistibly drawn to his new friends, the lives they lead, and the way they think, […]
Presented in partnership with Project ART Anything can be made exciting if you add just a bit of color- and a lot of yarn! Join ProjectART artist Sonia Báez Hernández for a very fun and very colorful and fuzzy art activity. About Sonia Báez Hernández: Sonia Báez Hernández Is a contemporary Afro-Caribbean artist, curator, and […]
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 […]
In Max Gross' The Lost Shtetl, a town that history missed – spared by the Holocaust and the Cold War, untouched by electricity, the internet, and indoor plumbing – is abruptly pulled into the 21st century, with seriocomic results. Gross talks about his novel with Moriel Rothman-Zecher, author of the heartbreaking coming-of-age tale, Sadness Is […]
Novelist Maaza Mengiste’s anthology Addis Ababa Noir offers 14 dark stories of complicated characters and bad behavior by some of Ethiopia's most talented writers, both living in the country and abroad. Salar Abdoh's Out of Mesopotamia is an unprecedented glimpse into “endless war” from a Middle Eastern perspective, a meditation that is moving, humane, darkly […]
Deemed by the Daily Mail to be a “showcase his lucid prose and freewheeling imagination,” Prayer for the Living is a collection of 23 stories by Booker Prize-winning Nigerian writer Ben Okri that take us from London to Byzantium to a printer's shop in Spain, deftly blurring the lines between parallel realities while rendering darkness […]
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 […]