The First Ever Wednesday Writers Series

made ripples across the Bay in 2007

 

On January 17, Mark Walters and Don Morrill kicked off the series at Tavern on the Green. 

Mark Walters, an associate professor of journalism at University of South Florida, St. Petersburg and the author of several highly acclaimed books, read excerpts from A Shadow and a Song, the story of Florida’s dusky seaside sparrow’s extinction, and his 2004 essay "Creation Unfolding", a story of growing up near Sebastian Inlet, Florida.  "Creation Unfolding" was published in Forum magazine and won the Florida Magazine Association’s 2005 Charlie Award for excellence in writing.  Dr. Walters, a veterinarian, frequently writes about endangered species and the connections between human health and the environment. Walters' 2003 book, Six Modern Plagues and How We Are Causing Them, was published by Shearwater Books/Island Press. It was widely reviewed in both the popular and scientific press, including the New York Times and Nature. In 2006 Walters published Seeking the Sacred Raven: Politics and Extinction on a Hawaiian Island.

Prior to joining USF in 2003, Dr. Walters was a visiting lecturer at Harvard Medical School. He received an undergraduate degree in English literature from McGill University, Montreal; a master’s from the Columbia University School of Journalism, New York; and a D.V.M. from Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine in Massachusetts. His articles have appeared in publications such as Audubon magazine and Reader’s Digest. He is a contributing editor of Orion magazine.

 

 

Donald Morrill read exerpts from two works of nonfiction, The Untouched Minutes and Sounding for Cool. Morrill is also the author of A Stranger’s Neighborhood as well as two volumes of poetry, At the Bottom of the Sky and With Your Back to Half the Day. His nonfiction and poetry have appeared in magazines and journals across the country and in numerous anthologies, garnering several prizes, among them the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Award (2004) and the Emerging Writers of Creative Nonfiction Award, Duquesne University Press (1998). From 1985-87, Morrill taught American Literature and Culture at Jilin University, Peoples Republic of China. From 1988-89, he was a Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Lodz, Poland. Currently, he is an editor of Tampa Review and the University of Tampa Press Poetry Series.

   

 

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On February 7, two prominent voices in environmental literature, Bill Belleville and Ann Fisher-Wirth, shared their meditations on the Southeastern and Florida landscape.

    

Bill Belleville, Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker and author of four books on nature, conservation and "sense of place," discussed his latest book, Losing It All To Sprawl: How Progress Ate My Cracker Landscape which Library Journal included in its list of "Best Books of 2006." Belleville, formerly a Writer in Residence for the Florida Studies program at USF, has authored over 1,000 articles and essays in publications such as Oxford American, Sierra, and the New York Times. Belleville has also worked on Discovery Channel expeditions in the Galapagos and Cuba, scripted radio documentaries with Philippe Cousteau for NPR, and is currently producing a PBS documentary on Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and the St. Johns River.

   

Of Sprawl, author Carl Hiaasen writes: "Bill Belleville writes gorgeously and straight from the heart. This is a compelling and insightful book and it's impossible to read it without feeling sadness, outrage and awe." Belleville lectures widely on the book's theme as part of the current Florida Humanities Council's "Road Scholars" series.

 

Ann Fisher-Wirth is author of the poetry collections Five Terraces and Blue Window. A Professor of English, Fisher-Wirth teaches poetry workshops and seminars, and courses in environmental literature, at the University of Mississippi. She also teaches yoga. She has had Fullbrights to the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and Uppsala University, Sweden. In 2006 she will become president of the 1000-member international Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. Her academic publications include a book, Williams Carlos Williams and Autobiography: The Woods of His Own Nature, and numerous articles on American writers.

        

 

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For our April 4 poetry event, we relocated the Wednesday Writers Series to a new location, the courtyard between the historic Williams house and Snell house.

  

An unexpected guest assisted TBWN directors Tom Hallock and Julie Armstrong in introducing the featured poets.

    

In the spirit of National Poetry Month, Martha Serpas and Gianmarc Manzione shared various works of poetry.

  

 

Martha Serpas read from two books of poems, Côte Blanche (New Issues, 2002) and The Dirty Side of the Storm (W. W. Norton, 2006). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, Southwest Review, and are included in American Religious Poetry (Library of America). She serves on the Steering Committee of the Arts, Literature and Religion section of the American Academy of Religion. In the Tampa community, she speaks frequently about the relationship between belief and literary works, and she is part of the Scholars Forum at the Franciscan Center. She is co-poetry editor of the Tampa Review.

Gianmarc Manzione read from his first book of poems, This Brevity, which was released in May 2006 by Parsifal Press. received an MFA in poetry from The New School in May 2004. Currently living in St. Petersburg, Florida, Gianmarc teaches composition at USF and also works as a freelance journalist. His poetry has appeared most recently in The Paris Review, Poetry Daily, The Southern Review and The Modern Review.

 

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Samantha Reive

 

David Durney

Pedro Jarquin;

Justin Whitney