April Myerscough is a grants coordinator at Florida Humanities, which most recently supported both Miami Book Fair’s NEA Big Read programming and the November festival. The native Floridian – who is an avid reader, natch – recently spoke with us about sharing Florida’s stories, a Great British Bake Off-style mystery, and an aardvark named Arthur.
Like any funder, you’re tasked with making strategic decisions about where your support will go. What led to Florida Humanities agreeing to fund Miami Book Fair and how does our work support your organization’s goals?
Florida Humanities became the Center for the Book, which is a Library of Congress affiliate program that helps promote literacy, literature, and a love of reading, in early 2022, and we quickly developed a competitive grant to help the wonderful variety of book festivals that happen in our state be as accessible as possible, because we know costs are rising for those events. Miami Book Fair reached out to us to share what you do, and subsequently became the very first recipient of that book festival grant, in part because your wide audience reach and diversity of programming and genre reflect our goals.
I love that we were the first! From a personal standpoint, how does what we do mesh with your own thoughts on access to literary culture?
I grew up as a reader and still love to read, and I genuinely believe that everyone can be a reader – some people just haven’t found the right book, audiobook, graphic novel, or comic book yet, and it’s just a matter of matching the right person with the right book. Your work not only encompasses one long week that celebrates literature, it continues year-round, bringing reading and a love of reading to everyone. Groups that connect people with books and authors they may not otherwise think of reading – or if they don’t like reading at all but then see something that piques their interest – I think that’s absolutely amazing.
Were you able to attend the Fair in November?
I wasn’t able to come this past year, but I watched some on-demand programs.
Which ones did you particularly enjoy?
I really liked the poetry panel with Ada Limón.
Oh, are you a big poetry person?
I’m not, but I thought I’d give it a try. [laughs] She’s a lovely speaker and I was very intrigued.
What are you reading right now?
I finished a book a few days ago called The Golden Spoon, which is a murder mystery set at a Great British Bake Off-esque location in New England. It was a fascinating read; I finished it in one day and the author did a great job of building the characters before the mystery even got started, so you felt even more on edge to know what happened, because you knew the characters really well. Everybody was a suspect!
That sounds right up my alley; I’m adding that one to my list.
It’s really, really good!
Is there a book you’ve heard of recently that you know will be the next thing you crack open?
Yes, one of my guilty pleasure-type reads – well, I don’t really consider it a guilty pleasure, they’re something I really enjoy – are Ali Hazelwood’s STEM/romantic comedy books. A new one just came out and I’m excited to get my hands on it soon from the library system.
What’s your ideal reading environment – do you have a fave spot where you like to curl up or are you in bed under the covers with a Kindle?
[laughs] I do have a cozy reading chair in my house, but especially in the summertime I love reading by the pool and enjoying a book outside.If you could sit down with any author, living or dead, who would they be and what’s the burning question you’d need to ask them?
Mark Brown, who’s the author of the Arthur book series and the creator of the television show, which was really important to me as a child. It was one of the first series of books that I really dug myself into, I think in kindergarten or first grade. I’d love to speak with him one on one and talk about what inspired him to write the series and what it was like to write the books and then write for television, and how those two things were different.
We’re living in difficult times – with book bans, attacks on educational curriculum and for many, the sense that free speech is in actual jeopardy. How is Florida Humanities navigating that?
We believe that every Floridian has a story to tell, and everybody’s unique experience and their community’s experience make the state what it is. Our organization will continue to provide funding and support to others that share our mission – like Miami Book Fair – and whether that’s through a funding opportunity, a partnership, or our Speakers’ Bureau, as an organization we’re dedicated to sharing stories that help foster a more understanding and accepting future.
That’s a good segue to touch on the specific programs Florida Humanities sponsored at Miami Book Fair 2022, which included Ada Limón, Mason Engel’s Bookstour, and the conversation with Melissa Fu, Tsering Yangzom Lama, and Shruti Swamy. How did you select the ones you ultimately put your stamp on, so to speak?
As a staff we did discuss that as a group and used our evaluators as well to have them weigh in, and we first and foremost selected programs that we believed connected your mission to ours, and then connected potential viewers and attendees of these programs to the humanities. And of course we wanted to select a wide spread of experiences and some fun programming too, like the discussion about independent bookshops in the Engel documentary. But really, we wanted to focus on programming that reflected our mission of sharing the humanities and the stories of Florida, with people in Florida and outside it.
Interview by Elisa Chemayne Agostinho; responses have been edited for space and clarity.
