Arts Alive! podcast: Florida Studies Book Festival

Christopher Miendl, director of the University of South Florida St. Petersburg’s lauded Florida Studies program, is the guest on today’s edition of Arts Alive! He’s here to discuss USF’s first-ever Florida Studies Book Festival, this Saturday (April 5) in the Nelson Poynter Memorial Library.

The free event, Miendl explains, was already in the planning stages when the Tampa Bay Times discontinued its long-running and much-loved Festival of Reading. With a dozen authors scheduled to speak, it’s significantly smaller than the Festival of Reading in its heyday (on the USFSP campus, coincidentally), but Miendl hopes it will satisfactorily fill the void for the city’s literary community.

Each of the participating authors have contributed to nonfiction Florida literature, most of them writing about history and/or environmental concerns.

Among the participants: Cynthia Barnett, Gary Mormino, Craig Pittman, Taylor Hagood, Andy Huse, Thomas Hallock, Julie Armstrong, Deb Carson, Kim Love, Ray Gardener and Miendl himself – he’s the author of Florida Springs: From Geography to Politics and Restoration.

For more information on the Florida Studies Book Festival, visit the website.

Click on the arrow to listen to the interview.