May 3, 2021
Sarah Gerard
I highly recommend this virtual multi-genre event Friday, May 7th, at 7:00EST—featuring five Florida writers launching books this year. It’s free to register.
Five From Florida: A Multigenre Reading with Diamond Forde, Tyler Gillespie, Dantiel W. Moniz, Gloria Muñoz, and JD Scott
Join five authors from various pockets of Florida who are debuting in a variety of genres (poetry! fiction! nonfiction!) this spring. Diamond Forde, Tyler Gillespie, Dantiel W. Moniz, Gloria Muñoz, and JD Scott will read from their new books.
This reading will be emceed by Yuki Jackson, who runs The Battleground, a grassroots project that provides education and empowerment to youth in the Sulphur Springs neighborhood of Tampa, FL.
While the reading is free and open to the public, we will be taking donations to benefit The Battleground and help it achieve its mission to increase literacy and reduce violence by teaching youth about rap, poetry, and martial arts. To donate directly to The Battleground’s GoFundMe, click here.
To support these writers and purchase their books, click here.
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Diamond Forde is author of Mother Body, winner of the 2019 Saturnalia Poetry Prize. Forde has received numerous awards and prizes, including the Pink Poetry Prize, the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, CLA’s Margaret Walker Memorial Prize, and 3rd place in Frontier Poetry’s New Poets Award. She is a Callaloo and Tin House fellow, whose work has appeared in Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, NELLE, Tupelo Quarterly, among others. Forde serves as the forthcoming editor of Southeast Review and lives in Tallahassee with her partner and their dog, Oatmeal.
Tyler Gillespie is a poet, award-winning journalist, and pale Floridian. He’s the author of Florida Man: Poems (Red Flag Poetry, 2018) and the CNF collection The Thing about Florida: Exploring a Misunderstood State (UPF, 2021).
Dantiel W. Moniz is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction, the Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award by the Key West Literary Seminar, and a Tin House Scholarship. Her debut collection, Milk Blood Heat, is an Indie Next Pick, an Amazon “Best Book of the Month” selection, a Belletrist and a Roxane Gay Audacious Book Club pick, and has been hailed as “must-read” by TIME, Entertainment Weekly, Buzzfeed, Elle, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, One Story, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and elsewhere. She lives in Northeast Florida and currently teaches fiction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Gloria Muñoz is a Colombian American writer, literary translator, and advocate for multilingual literacy. Her poetry book Dawn’s Early / Danzirly was awarded the Academy of American Poets 2019 Ambroggio Prize. Other honors include Lumina’s Multilingual Nonfiction Writing Award, a Las Musas Mentorship for Latinx and nonbinary authors, and a New York State Summer Writers Institute Fellowship. She is also the author of Your Biome Has Found You (Finishing Line Press, 2017). A proponent of cross-disciplinary collaboration, Muñoz has worked alongside botanists, musicians, dancers, historians, visual artists, conservationists, and neuroscientists. She is a co-founder of the film organization Pitch Her Productionsand she is one half of the songwriting team Moonlit Música. She teaches creative writing at Eckerd College.
JD Scott is the author of the story collection Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day (&NOW Books, 2020) and the poetry collection Mask for Mask (New Rivers Press, 2021). Scott’s writing has appeared in Best Experimental Writing, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. More of Scott’s work can be found at jdscott.com.
Yuki Jackson is a Black and Japanese poet whose work has appeared in Cream City Review, Four Way Review, Foundry, Entropy and other publications. She is also an educator and founder of The Battleground, a youth program in the Sulphur Springs neighborhood of Tampa, Florida. Her writing is inspired by her Soka Gakkai International Buddhist practice, hip-hop lyricism and the art within daily life. For more on Yuki’s work, check out YukiJackson.com.
