Inaugural UCF Book Festival!

Tons of great writers and poets will be appearing at UCF's Inagural Book Festival April 16-17. Look forward to catching up with Kelle Groom, Michael Hettich, John Dufresne and many, many more! Check the link for the full list of authors and events.
http://education.ucf.edu/bookfest/

New Book, Another Award Winner!

A. Manette Ansay's latest novel, Good Things I Wish You, has been awarded a 2009 Florida Book Award (bronze) and will be published in paperback this June by HarperPerennial.

Ansay is the author of six novels, including Vinegar Hill, an Oprah Book Club Selection, and Midnight Champagne, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as a short story collection, Read This and Tell Me What It Says, and a memoir, Limbo. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, a Pushcart Prize, the Nelson Algren Prize, and two Great Lakes Book Awards. She lives with her daughter in Florida, where she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Miami.

Kelle Groom Readings Coming Up!

This spring, Kelle Groom will be reading from her new poetry collection Five Kingdoms at venues throughout the state. The next one is:

• Saturday, April 17, Time: TBA, UCF Book Festival , UCF Arena.

Kelle Groom’s previous poetry collections are Underwater City (University of Florida, 2004), and Luckily, a Florida Book Award winner (Anhinga, 2006). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, DoubleTake, Gettysburg Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Witness, among others.

A Bronze Medal Honor for FLAC Members

Poet Peter Meinke, a featured reader at the past two FLAC Other Words Conferences, has just been awarded the Florida Book Award’s Bronze Medal for Poetry for Lines from Neuchatel: The Thirty-fifth Anniversary Edition. The special edition was published by a founding FLAC member, the University of Tampa Press. Meinke is the author of seven books of poems in the prestigious Pitt Poetry Series. He is also the author of two collections of short stories, The Piano Tuner, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award, and, recently, Unheard Music. In 2009 he was appointed the first Poet Laureate of the City of St. Petersburg, Florida, where he and his wife, the artist Jeanne Clark, whose drawings are featured prominently in Lines from Neuchatel, have lived since 1966.