Local poet Tyler Gillespie’s innovative collection FLORIDA MAN: POEMS, strips away the accepted myths of his home state and its inhabitants in poems centered on Florida’s history and culture.

Now in this second, extended edition of his collection, FLORIDA MAN: POEMS, REVISITED, Gillespie uses a lyric mix of journalism, science, family lore, and lived experience to reveal complex realities of the state and a redemption that’s wondrously messy and surprising.

The event will include a reading by Tyler followed by a conversation with Chad Mize and Gloria Muñoz about art, writing, and upcoming projects!

GRAB YOUR COPY OF THE BOOK HERE!

Tyler Gillespie is a fifth-generation Floridian whose multi-genre writing often focuses on the state’s environment, its history/culture, and LGBTQ+ communities. He’s reported on these topics for Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, GQ, The Guardian, The Daily Best, VICE, and Playboy. His poems appear in numerous anthologies while his humor writing can be found in the New Yorker, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and LGBTQ Comedic Monologues That Are Actually Funny.

Gillespie expanded his writing on Florida through a blend of journalistic techniques, archival research, memoir, and humor in the essay collection The Thing about Florida: Exploring a Misunderstood State (University Press of Florida, 2021). He’s also mixed forms, styles, and techniques in the poetry collections Florida Man: Poems (Red Flag Poetry, 2018) and the nature machine! (Autofocus, 2023).

He’s an award-winning teacher who pulls from his various writing experiences to create unique classroom communities. He currently teaches writing at Ringling College of Art + Design in Sarasota.

Chad Mize is a multimedia artist, designer and muralist residing in St. Petersburg, Florida. He was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1974, and then moved to Tampa Bay Florida, where he spent most of his childhood. An early interest in art resulted in his earning a BFA in Visual Communications at the University of Mississippi. With a love for past and contemporary culture, he takes a humorous, tongue-in-cheek approach to his designs, which include playful doodles, colorful patterns, political art and graphics with text.

His contributions to the thriving St. Petersburg art scene include working on the SHINE Mural Festival, which brings artists from around the world to paint murals in St. Petersburg. In 2018, Mize opened the gallery MIZE in the Historic Uptown neighborhood of St Petersburg. Following the closing of MIZE in 2022 he set his sights on a larger gallery project entitled SPACE, located on the property of the St. Petersburg Distillery. Currently he is curating SPACE with quarterly group exhibits.

Mize’s work is held in numerous private and corporate collections nationally and internationally.

Gloria Muñoz is a Colombian American writer, translator, and advocate for multilingual literacy. She is the author of Your Biome Has Found You and Danzirly (University of Arizona Press, 2021), which won the Ambroggio Prize and the Gold Medal Florida Book Award. Her other honors include an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellowship, Hedgebrook Fellowship, being a Macondista, Highlights Foundation’s Diverse Verse Fellowship, Lumina’s Multilingual Writing Award, a Las Musas Mentorship, St. Pete Arts Alliance’s Muse Award, Creative Pinellas’ Artist Grant, and attending the Tin House YA writers workshop. Through Moonlit Música, the company she cofounded, Muñoz writes and composes music for bilingual children’s programming in audio, film, and curriculum. She is proud to be St. Pete’s first Latina poet laureate.