“THE PAST, PRESENT & FUTURE OF FLORIDA: A POETRY READING” – PANEL

ARIEL FRANCISCO is the author of the forthcoming All the Places We Love Have Been Left in Ruins (Burrow Press), Under Capitalism If Your Head Aches They Just Yank Off Your Head (Flowersong Press), and A Sinking Ship is Still a Ship (Burrow Press). He is the translator of Haitian Dominican poet Jacques Viau Renaud’s Poet of One Island (Get Fresh Books) and Guatemalan poet Hael Lopez’s Routines/Goodbyes (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing). A poet and translator born in the Bronx, New York, to Dominican and Guatemalan parents and raised in Miami, his work has been published by The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, Latino Book Review, the Academy of American Poets, the New York City Ballet, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of poetry and Hispanic studies at Louisiana State University.

DAVID KIRBY teaches at Florida State University. His latest books are a poetry collection, The Winter Dance Party, Poems 1983-2023 (LSU Press), and a textbook entitled The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them. Kirby is also the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock 'n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement described as “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” He is currently on the board of Alice James Books.

JEN KARETNICK is the author of Inheritance with a High Error Rate (Cider Press Review), winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award. She is also the author of 11 poetry collections, including The Burning Where Breath Used to Be, a CIPA Evvy Gold Medal winner and an Eric Hoffer poetry finalist. She has won the Sweet: Lit Poetry Prize, Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, among other honors, and has received support from the Vermont Studio Center, Roundhouse Foundation, Wildacres Retreat, Centrum, Artists in Residence in the Everglades, and elsewhere. The co-founder/managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, Karetnick's work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Harpur Palate, Notre Dame Review, Pleiades, Shenandoah, South Dakota Review, and other publications.