Nina Romano's First Novel, The Secret Language of Women

FIU MFA alumna Nina Romano's The Secret Language of Women, an historical novel set against the background of the Boxer Rebellion, has recently been published by Turner Publishing. The first of the Wayfarer Trilogy, the novel will be followed by Lemon Blossoms, set in mob-era Sicily, and In America, which moves to in Brooklyn during the Great Depression.

Among Romano's earlier works are the poetry chapbooks Prayer in a Summer of Grace and Time's Mirrored Illusion (both, Flutter Press) and Faraway Confections, a full-length collection from Aldrich Press. You can read more about these and other projects at Romano's website. She will be reading from and discussing her book at Murder on the Beach bookstore in Delray Beach along with author D.J. Niko on Nov. 13 at 7 PM, at Miami Book Fair International's Festival of Authors, Sat. Nov. 21st at 2 PM,  and at Books & Books in Coral Gables on December 11th at 6 PM.

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.

FIU MFA Program Well-Represented at Miami Book Fair International

Miami Book Fair International is celebrating its 30th anniversary this week. FIU’s Creative Writing program will be well-represented, with faculty, students, and alumni among the more than 300 authors who’ll be presenting at the Festival of Authors. Here’s a quick listing of those from FIU, the works they’ll be reading from and/or speaking about, with the day time of the presentation.  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.)

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 a record number of FIU MFA alumni and graduate students, including FBR Editor Lynne Barrett’s Literary Journalism class.

Saturday, Nov. 23:

11:30 AM: Richard Blanco (Looking for the Gulf Motel) and Campbell McGrath (In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys)
1 PM: E. Parker Phillips (Panel: Queer Poetry/Queer Differences)

1:30 PM: Nina Romano (She Wouldn’t Sing at My Wedding) and Laura Valeri (Safe in Your Head)

3 PM: Julie Marie Wade (Postage Due)

3:30 PM: Joe Clifford (Junkie Love)

4 PM: Campbell McGrath (Florida Book Awards)

4 PM: The Miami Poetry Collective & Cent Journal, the “How To” issue, including: Annik Adey-Babinski, Marci Calabretta, Paul Christiansen, P. Scott Cunningham, Dawn S. Davies, Yaddyra Peralta, and Nick Vagnoni

Sunday, Nov. 24:

 11 AM: John Dufresne (Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting)

11:30: Anjanette Delgado, panel: El mercado del libro en español en Estados Unidos: situación, evolución, y opportunidades

12:30 PM: James W. Hall (Going Dark)

2 PM: John Dufresne (No Regrets, Coyote)

3:30 PM: Patricia Engel (It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris)

4 PM: Melanie Neale (Boat Kid)

4:30 PM: Richard Blanco (For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey)

4:30 PM: Preston Allen (Every Boy Should Have a Man)

5 PM: Tigertail, A South Florida Annual: Sunstruck Matches, a reading, including Elisa Albo, J.J. Colagrande, Andrea Dulanto, Jesse Millner, and Lauren Doyle Owen

5 PM: All that Glitters: Nonfiction from Sliver of Stone, a reading, including Jan Becker, M.J. Fievre, Nicholas Garnett, and Fabienne Sylvia Josaphat

Spot the FIU MFA Program at the Miami Book Fair This Weekend

FIU’s MFA program will be well-represented at Miami Book Fair International this weekend, Nov. 17 & 18th.  To find when any of those listed below are presenting, check the Author List. You can see the full Book Fair schedule here.


Faculty who'll be representing their latest books: Lynne Barrett (Magpies), Debra Dean (The Mirrored World),  Campbell McGrath (In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys), and Les Standiford (Desperate Sons: Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Hancock, and the Secret Bands of Radicals Who Led the Colonies to War). In addition, our long-time writer-in-residence Dan Wakefield returns to Miami with Kurt Vonnegut: Letters. And James W. Hall (retired, but teaching this Spring) discusses Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers.

Alumni authors you can hear at the Fair: Richard Blanco Looking for the Gulf Motel, J.J. Colagrande (Decò), M.J. Fievre So Spoke the Earth: A Haiti Anthology, Yousi Mazpule (Jinetera: Story of a Cuban Prostitute), Jesse Millner (Dispatches from the Department of Supernatural Explanation), Melanie Neale (Boat Girl:  A Memoir of Youth, Love, & Fiberglass), and Neil Plakcy (Dog Helps Those). 

Perhaps the best opportunity of seeing lots of MFA people together will be the Sweat Broadside Collaboration reading and panel in Centre Gallery, Sat. at 2:30. Lynne Barrett, John Dufresne, Denise Duhamel, Campbell McGrath, Yaddyra Peralta and Nick Vagnoni will be among those reading from their contributions to this artist-writer collaborative project. Others who participated are David Beaty, Pete Borrebach, David Gonzalez who may be in the audience and joining in the discussion, and the show of 50+ broadsheets is up in the gallery now through early December.

Behind the scenes at the Book Fair, making this huge event happen, MFA alumna Lissette Mendez is Program Coordinator at the Center @ MDC (the organization that runs the Fair as well as workshops all year and the Miami Writers Institute), and alumnus Nick  Garnett is Copywriter and Editor.  Current MFA student Jennifer McCauley is an intern with the Fair this fall. All week, MFA students and alumni will be participating in The Florida Book Review annual live-blog of the Book Fair, led by FBR Editor Lynne Barrett.  Those far from Miami can keep up with the Fair by reading the coverage which has already begun.

So Spoke the Earth, Edited by M.J. Fievre, Debuts

M.F.A. alumna M.J. Fievre has edited So Spoke the Earth, a Haiti anthology, published by Women Writers of Haitian Descent, Inc.  The collection of essays, stories, and poems includes work in English, French, and Creole, and is organized into three sections ("Death Was Lurking," "And the Danger Came Rushing In," and "And the Truth Shall Make you Mad") in which contributors explore Haiti's "past, present and future as experienced by its diverse inhabitants—both native and non-native—over the past four decades." 


Fievre will be moderating a panel featuring contributor Edwige Danticat at Miami Book Fair International. Among the contributors is current MFA student Fabienne Sylvia Josaphat. Women Writers of Haitian Descent, Inc., is a literary organization founded in 2002 to encourage the development of Haitian women writers and to promote greater public awareness and appreciation of their work. Their website is www.wwohd.org.  For more on M.J. Fievre, see her website.

Dan Wakefield Has Edited Kurt Vonnegut: The Letters

FIU's long-time Writer-in-Residence Dan Wakefield has "splendidly assembled and edited" (New York Times) the letters of Kurt Vonnegut. The book is just out from Delacorte Press. A starred review in Publishers Weekly says of Kurt Vonnegut: The Letters,  “Fans will find the collection as spellbinding as Vonnegut’s best novels, and casual readers will discover letters as splendid in their own way as those of Keats.”
 

Dan's many fans in South Florida will be welcoming him back to Miami in November when he'll appear at Miami Book Fair International.  Dan was Writer-in-Residence in the FIU Creative Writing Program from 1994-2010, and received the university's Excellence in Graduate Mentorship Award. He teaches in the Low Residency MFA in Writing Program at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C.  and leads workshops  in "Spiritual Autobiography" and "Creating from the Spirit" all around the U.S.  Readers can learn more about Dan's novels, books of nonfiction, and many other projects and achievements on his website.

Boat Girl, Melanie Neal's Memoir, Sets Sail

Boat Girl: A Memoir of Youth, Love, and Fiberglass details the coming-of-age-experiences of Melanie Neale, a 2006 FIU MFA Creative Writing program graduate. The memoir began, in part, as her MFA thesis, based on her experiences when her family lived on a boat sailing along the U.S. east coast and the Bahamas in the 1980s and 1990s.

As those who were her classmates know, Neale lived aboard her own 28' sailboat while she was in the MFA program. Boat Girl is published by Orlando-based Beating Windward Press, which specializes in literary fiction and nonfiction.

 At Neale's website, you can learn more about the book as well as the many literary journals and magazines where her work has been published.  She'll be appearing at Miami Book Fair International in November.