A vibrant and gritty debut from poet Arielle Hebert, Bottom Feeders is a queer coming-of-age collection set in late 2000s Florida, during the height of the opioid epidemic.

Tombolo Books welcomes poet Arielle Hebert to the bookstore to celebrate her debut collection, Bottom Feeders. Hebert will be in conversation with local poet Tyler Gillespie! 

More about Bottom Feeders

Here, overdoses, red tide blooms, and hurricanes are as much a part of growing up as fleeting teenage desires, beach parties, and prom.

This is a landscape of glitter and grime, where young queer love is tested by the tides of addiction and recovery. The collection thrums with a sense of spectacle and surreality, accented by Sarasota's history as a circus town and Florida's deadly wildlife—alligators, needlefish, invasive snakes. The heat, humidity, and salt air of the Gulf become characters in their own right, as haunting as the love, grief, and loss found here. Despite the long shadows cast over these poems, there is beauty, friendship, chosen family, and hope in Bottom Feeders.

Arielle Hebert is a queer poet based in Durham, NC, with roots in Florida and Louisiana. She holds an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University. She won the 2024 Lit/South Award for Poetry selected by Jericho Brown and was included in Best New Poets 2024, guest edited by Anders Carlson-Wee. Her work has appeared inSouthern Humanities Review, Grist, Great River Review, Nimrod, andRedivider, among others.Bottom Feederswas a finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award and is her debut poetry collection.

Tyler Gillespie is a writer, independent greeting card maker, and the palest Floridian you'll ever meet. He’s an award-winning journalist and the author of 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’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.

His reporting appears in Rolling Stone, The Guardian, GQ, VICE, The Daily Beast, Playboy, and other outlets. 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. Gillespie teaches at Ringling College of Art and Design, where he is currently the Writing Program Coordinator.