Tombolo Books welcomes poet and professor Ariel Francisco to the bookstore to read from his latest poetry collection, All the Places We Love Have Been Left in Ruins!

In his fourth collection of poems, Francisco mourns a Miami already ruined by climate change and development, and meditates on the future ruins of a city reclaimed by the sea. From constant flooding to the construction of a hulking Margaritaville on Hollywood Beach, Francisco weaves an elegy to a city in existential limbo with a blend of anger, humor, sadness, and insight.

This edition includes Spanish translations by Francisco Henriquez Rosa, who will join Francisco for the event to read poems in Spanish, that appear beside the original English. Francisco will also be joined by local poets Tyler Gillespie and Gloria Muñoz for a conversation following the reading!

Ariel Francisco is the author of All the Places We Love Have Been Left in Ruins (Burrow Press, 2024), Under Capitalism If Your Head Aches They Just Yank Off Your Head (Flowersong Press, 2022), and A Sinking Ship is Still a Ship (Burrow Press, 2020), and the translator of Haitian-Dominican poet Jacques Viau Renaud’s Poet of One Island (Get Fresh Books, 2024) and Guatemalan poet Hael Lopez’s Routines/Goodbyes (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022). A poet and translator born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents and raised in Miami, his work has been published in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, POETRY Magazine, The New York City Ballet, Latino Book Review, and elsewhere. He is Assistant Professor of Poetry and Hispanic Studies at Louisiana State University.

Francisco Henriquez Rosa was born in Santiago, Dominican Republic, in 1957. He graduated from the Dominican Institute of Journalism in 1979, Hostos Community College in 1984, and City College CUNY in 1993. He has collaborated with WCR radio at City College and his poems have appeared in literary magazines throughout the Dominican Republic, Argentina, New York, and Florida. He won 4th place in the Argentinian Prize for International Poetry. He published a collection of Dominican aphorisms in 2004 and is the founder and director of the Orlando Tertulia.

Gloria Muñoz is the author of Your Biome Has Found You and Danzirly, which won the Ambroggio Prize and the Florida Gold Medal Book Award for Poetry. She is an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow, a Hedgebrook Fellow, a Macondista, a Highlights Foundation Diverse Verse Fellow, and a part of Las Musas. This Is the Year is her debut novel. Visit her online at gloriamunoz.com and on Instagram at @bygloriamunoz.

Tyler Gillespie is the author of the nonfiction collection The Thing about Florida: Exploring a Misunderstood State (University Press of Florida, 2021) and two poetry collections — the nature machine! (Autofocus, 2023) and Florida Man: Poems, Revisited (Burrow Press, 2024). He is represented by Lauren MacLeod at Aevitas Creative Management.

A former journalist, his reporting appears in Rolling Stone, The Guardian, GQ, VICE, The Daily Beast, Playboy, and other outlets. He’s the co-editor of The Awkward Phase (Skyhorse, 2016), and his humor writing can be found in the New Yorker, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and LGBTQ Comedic Monologues That Are Actually Funny. Gillespie is a fifth-generation Floridian and wrote the introduction for A24’s Florida! A Hyper-Local Guide to the Flora, Fauna, and Fantasy of the Most Far-out State in America.

He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans and a PhD in English: Writing, Rhetoric, & Technical Communication from the University of Memphis. In 2021, he won The X. A. Kramer, Jr. Outstanding Teaching Award at the University of Mississippi. He’s currently a Professor and Writing Program Coordinator at Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasoat, FL.