Dave Landsberger's Poetry Collection Suicide by Jaguar Debuts

Suicide by Jaguar, the first full-length poetry collection by MFA alumnus Dave Landsberger, has just been published by Miami-based Jai-Alai Books.  The book was designed in a bilingual format, also containing Suicido por Jaguar, a Spanish language version of the poems, translated by J.V. Portela.  Landsberger's poems have been described as having the themes of "death, tacos, Egyptian mythology, basketball, motherhood, and beauty.

The collection was launched during Miami Book Fair International, with a Jai-Alai press party at Ball & Chain in Little Havana, and Landsberger, who lives in Chicago, read on Sunday, Nov. 23rd at the Fair. Landsberger's poetry has been profiled in The New Yorker and The Chicago Tribune, and his comic "Beef Jams" is currently being published in serial form by Image Comics. He is a founding member, along with Kathleen Rooney, of Poems While You Wait, a group of public performance typewriter poets. His chapbook, Whoa, Yeah, Baby, is available for free at Floating Wolf Quarterly.  (Dave Landsberger photo, credit Gesi Schilling Photography.)

FIU MFA Authors at Miami Book Fair International 2014

At Miami Book Fair International this week. FIU’s Creative Writing program will be well-represented, with faculty, students, and alumni among the more than 500 authors who’ll be presenting at the Festival of Authors. Below is a quick listing of those from FIU, the books they’ll be speaking about or the special presentations they’re involved in, with the day and time.  For rooms and other details, please see the complete Book Fair Schedule online.  (And at the Fair, pick up a printed copy which will be updated with any changes.)

This year, the Book Fair is introducing The Swamp, a pop-up lounge in a big tent at the southeast corner of N.E. 3rd Street and 2nd Ave, that showcases Florida stories, music, dance, film, history, and art.  “All week long, Swamp events will explore the beauty, contradictions, uniqueness, and downright ‘weirdness’ of life in Florida.”  Swamp events are listed separately in the Street Fair part of the schedule.  MFA alumna Emma Trelles is interviewed in this Cultist blog piece in the Miami New Times about one of the Swamp events that includes a number of FIU writers, The Sweat II Broadsheet project.

The O Miami Poetry Festival, directed by MFA alumnus Scott Cunningham, has produced a special Poetry Guide to the Book Fair, highlighting poetry-related events, including special micro-workshops in poetry at the Jai-Alai books booth.

To find out what goes on at the sessions you miss, you can read The Florida Book Review's annual Book Fair Blog,  reported this year by two dozen FIU MFA alumni and graduate students, led by faculty member and FBR Editor Lynne Barrett.

Sunday Nov. 16:

7:30 PM O Miami Poetry Karaoke Lounge, Scott Cunningham, O Miami Founder/Director, The Swamp

Wednesday, Nov. 19:

7 PM Launch of Badass—Lip Service True Stories, The Double Album, with Nicholas Garnett and Esther Martinez-Keniff, The Swamp

Thursday, Nov. 20:

5 PM Poem Depot: Poetry on Demand, with Ashley M. Jones and Laura McDermott Matheric, The Swamp

6 PM Fifteen Views of Miami launch, Battle of Literary Short Stories: Miami vs. Orlando, with JJ Colagrande, The Swamp

Saturday, Nov. 22:

10 AM, Elisa Albo, Each Day More

11 AM: James W. Hall, The Big Finish

12:30 Sweat Broadside Project II: Readings and Limited Edition Broadside Giveaway, with Annik Adey-Babinski, Lynne Barrett, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello,  Cathleen Chambless,  John Dufresne,Yaddyra Peralta, Emma Trelles, and Nick Vagnoni, The Swamp

4:30 PM  Denise Duhamel, Blowout

5:30 PM: John Dufresne, No Regrets, Coyote

6 PM: Julie Marie Wade, When I Was Straight

Sunday, Nov. 23

10 AM: John W. Evans, Young Widower: A Memoir

11 AM: Cecilia M. Fernandez, Leaving Little Havana

11 AM: Parker Phillips, Reading Queer  presents This Is For the Ladies Who Brunch, The Swamp

12 PM: Ran Henry, Spurrier: How the Ball Coach Taught the South to Play Football

1 PM: Anjanette Delgado, The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho

2 PM: Richard Blanco,  The Prince of Los Cocuyos, a Miami Childhood

2:30 PM:  Joe Clifford, Lamentation

5:30 PM: Anjanette Delgado, The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho, in Spanish.

6 PM: Dave Landsberger, Suicide by Jaguar

Just Published: Ran Henry's Spurrier

Lyons Press has just published Spurrier: How the Ball Coach Taught the South to Play Football by FIU MFA alumnus Ran Henry.  Publishers Weekly says, "Committed to piercing the media-hyped myth of Spurrier, Henry has written a wise and honest biography of a man who has revamped the strategy of college football, making it more exciting for players and fans alike."

Henry has written for the Florida Times-Union, the St. Petersburg Times, and Tropic, the Miami Herald Sunday magazine, and has taught writing at FIU and Virginia Commonwealth University. He currently teaches at the University of Virginia and teaches football writing for the Honors College at the University of South Carolina. He first interviewed Steve Spurrier in 1986 and began writing Spurrier when the coach led the Florida Gators to their first-ever national championship in 1997. Henry divides his time between Charlottesville, VA, Columbia, SC, and a home in the mountains of West Virginia.

Henry's extensive book tour will bring him to Florida, including a game day reading at the University of Florida Bookstore in Gainesville on Saturday, Nov. 15th. On Sunday, Nov. 16th, he will be presenting at Miami Book Fair International at noon.

Just Published: Joe Clifford's Lamentation

Joe Clifford’s third novel, Lamentation, has just been published by Oceanview Publishing. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly says Clifford, “understands human potential for moral collapse and redemption, and his lean, gritty prose never lets characters or readers off the hook.”  Revolt Daily’s Renee Asher Pickup writes, "Crime writers are known for getting down to the grit of real life, but not all of them can pull off the heart Clifford works into his writing. Through the story you will roll your eyes at the protagonist one moment, cheer for him the next, and find your heart breaking by the end."

Since graduating from the MFA program, Clifford has published a collection of short stories, Choice Cuts,  his thesis novel, Wake the Undertaker, (both, Snubnose Press), and an autobiographical novel, Junkie Love (Battered Suitcase Press).  While in the MFA program, he was editor of Gulf Stream Magazine, and since graduating he has pursued editing as well as writing. He is co-editor of The Flash Fiction Offensive.  In December, Out of the Gutter and Zelmer Pulp will bring out Trouble in the Heartland, a collection of crime stories inspired by the songs of Bruce Springsteen that Clifford has edited. 

Clifford's book tour will bring him to Murder on the Beach in Delray Beach on Wednesday, Nov. 19th, and he’ll be among the presenters at Miami Book Fair International Sunday Nov. 23rd.  He discusses his time in the MFA program and his path to publication in an interview with MFA student Justin Bendell in Sliver of Stone Magazine's latest issue.  More info. at Clifford's blog, Candy and Cigarettes.

MFA Program 25th Anniversary Celebration Nov. 1st Featuring Richard Blanco

On Saturday, November 1, a celebration of  25 years of the MFA program in Creative Writing at FIU will feature special guest, Richard Blanco, 2013 Inaugural Poet and MFA alumnus. The event will be held at 8 PM at the Coral Cables Congregational Church (across the street from the Biltmore Hotel, and will be free and open to the public. For information and to reserve a place at this event, please go to our website.

Award-winning poet Richard Blanco has turned to prose for his memoir The Prince of Los Cocuyos, just published by Ecco Press. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly says, “Blanco has a natural, unforced style that allows his characters’ vibrancy and humor to shine through.”  O Magazine adds, “In this vibrant memoir, Obama-inaugural poet Richard Blanco tenderly, exhilaratingly chronicles his Miami childhood amid a colorful, if suffocating, family of Cuban exiles, as well as his quest to find his artistic voice and the courage to accept himself as a gay man.” You can listen to Blanco discuss the book in this NPR interview and learn about appearances on his book tour on his website.

Julie Marie Wade Awarded 2014 To The Lighthouse Prize

Julie Marie Wade's poetry manuscript SIX has been selected as the winner of the A Room of Her Own (AROHO) Foundation's To The Lighthouse Prize by final judge C.D. Wright.

Wright wrote, “I chose SIX not in spite of but because of its discursiveness, its willingness to wander through the poem with technique at hand, but also a permit to allow both substantive and ephemeral material to wander into the field of the poem and exit without a conclusive goal in mind. It’s an accumulative project, inclusive, and busy about the business of sifting and sorting through this thing we call life that we carry out in this creation we call a body on this tumultuous blue orb we call earth.”

Wade, an Assistant Professor teaching in the Creative Writing Program at F.I.U. is the author of Without: Poems (Finishing Line Press); Small Fires; Essays (Sarabande Books) ; Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems (White Pine Press), winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series; Tremolo: An Essay (Bloom Books), winner of the Bloom Nonfiction Chapbook Prize; When I Was Straight: Poems (A Midsummer Night’s Press); and the forthcoming Catechism: A Love Story (Noctuary Press, 2016).  Her 2010 book Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures, winner of the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir; was first published in 2010 by Colgate University Press, and has just been reissued by Bywater Books.  You can learn more about her work and upcoming events on her website.

Dennis Lehane Short Story Becomes a Film and a Novel

FIU MFA alumnus Dennis Lehane's The Drop, now out as both a novel from William Morrow and a film from Fox Searchlight Pictures, began as the short story "Animal Rescue," first published in Akashic Books' Boston Noir and chosen for Best American Mystery Stories 2010. Lehane wrote the screenplay for the film, in which the action moves to New York City, but the novel stays in Boston's Dorchester.  Publisher's Weekly calls the novel a "gritty gem," and The Guardian says, "“He has reworked [the story] into a smart, grubby and thoroughly enjoyable novel to coincide with the film's release.”

Photo: Radio Boston

What is it like to write both the screenplay and the novel? Lehane discusses the differences in an interview with Boston Magazine. You can watch the trailer for the film which co-stars Tom Hardy and James Galdolfini, here.

Just Published: Anjanette Delgado's The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho

MFA alumna Anjanette Delgado's second novel The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho has just been published by Kensington Books. In their advance review, Publisher's Weekly says, "It doesn't take a psychic to predict this fun novel will be a hit." The Spanish language edition, La Clarividente de Calle Ocho, will be released in September in the U.S. and Mexico by Suma de Letras, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

 Delgado began her career as a journalist for NBC, CBS, Univision and Telemoundo, among others, and  covered presidential coups, elections, the Olympics, both Iraq wars and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. She has written for NPR, Vogue, NBC, and created, wrote, and developed the sitcom Great in Bed for HBO Latin America. She won an Emmy for her series "Madres en la Lehanía" about the plight of mothers who leave their children to come to the U.S. to work as undocumented nannies.

While she was a student in the MFA program, Delgado's first novel, The Heartbreak Pill, was published in English and, as Píldora de Mal Amor, in Spanish.  It won first prize at the Latino International Book Award for Best Romance in English, among other awards. Delgado, who received her degree in 2012, wrote The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho as her MFA thesis.

You can read Shelf Awareness Book Brahmin's interview with Delgado, and an excerpt from The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho is online at Squarespace.  You can learn more at her website. She will be among those reading at the FIU alumni Writers on the Bay celebration at Books and Books in Coral Gables, Sunday, September 14th at 4 PM, and will return to the bookstore for a book launch on Oct. 17th. Store owner Mitchell Kaplan should be on hand to explain how he feels about his role as a character in the novel.

Nina Romano's Latest Chapbook Published

This summer, Flutter Press has published Time's Mirrored Illusion, a chapbook of poetry by MFA alumna Nina Romano. Among Romano's other books are Faraway Confections, a full-length collection that came out from Aldrich Press, an imprint of Kelsay Books, in Fall 2013, and the chapbook Prayer in a Summer of Grace (Flutter Press).

You can read more about Nina's writing and other projects at her website. She will be reading at Liberty Bookstore in West Palm Beach on October 30th at 7 PM.

Denise Duhamel Named a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow

FIU Creative Writing professor Denise Duhamel has been selected as a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow.  The fellowships are awarded to candidates who have demonstrated exceptional ability in scholarship or creative activities.

In an interview with FIU News, Duhamel says that she is currently working on a book of poetry exploring the relationship between men and women, and wants to visit the Galapagos Islands to see nature untouched by progress as she thinks about gender roles, nature, and culture.

Duhamel's most recent collection  of poetry, Blowout, was a finalst for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and she servedd as the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2013. Duhamel has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Puffin Foundation, and Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust for Theater.

Edward Hirsch, president of the Foundation, is enthusiastic about the Fellows in the class of 2014: “It’s exciting to name 178 new Guggenheim Fellows. These artists and writers, scholars and scientists, represent the best of the best. Since 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has always bet everything on the individual, and we’re thrilled to continue the tradition with this wonderfully talented and diverse group. It’s an honor to be able to support these individuals to do the work they were meant to do.” You can read a full list of this year's Guggenheim Fellows here.

Julie Marie Wade's New Chapbook: When I Was Straight

Julie Marie Wade's poetry chapbook When I Was Straight has been published by A Midsummer Night's Press. The book had a pre-publication launch signing at AWP 2014 in Seattle, and is currently a finalist for the Over the Rainbow juried book list of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table of the American Library Association.

In addition, Wade's Wishbone: A Memoir In Fractures, originally published by Colgate University Press, which sold out its first printing, is being reissued by Bywater Books in November 2014.

You can read an interview with Wade, about her recent and forthcoming publications, at Late Night Library.

Young Widower by John W. Evans Published

MFA alumnus John W. Evans' memoir, Young Widower, winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize, has just been published by the University of Nebraska Press. Booklist praises "the unfolding and cathartic grieving process that underpins and elevates this heartbreaking tale." You can read an adapted excerpt from the book published by Slate.


Evans' poetry collection, Consolations, will be published by Trio House Press in March 2014 and he'll be signing advance copies of it at the AWP in Seattle. Since completing his MFA at FIU, Evans has been a Stegner Fellow in Poetry and a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, where he continues to teach creative writing. More about Evans and his writing on his website.