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April 26-28, 2024

Word of South

FAMU Choral Society Chorale, Led by Dr. Mark Butler

The Internationally acclaimed Florida A&M University Concert Choir. For nearly sixty years the FAMU Concert Choir has maintained a standard of choral excellence. The University Choir performs a diverse repertoire that spans the genres of classical, jazz, contemporary, spiritual, gospel, and other multicultural styles. The Choir’s goal is to promote and cultivate the understanding of […]

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Sheila E.

One of life’s constants for Sheila E. comes down to a simple phrase: follow the beat. And her impeccable inner rhythm is the pulse behind a trailblazing career that still knows no bounds.  World-class drummer and percussionist whose credits read like chapters in a music history book: Ringo Starr. Marvin Gaye, Prince, Beyoncé, Herbie Hancock, […]

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Dog House Band

The Dog House Band is a group of writer-musicians associated with the Bennington Writing Seminars, the low-residency MFA program at Vermont’s Bennington College. In the mid-2000s, faculty members Sven Birkerts and David Gates started getting together to swap songs at the Dog House—the only petfriendly house on the Bennington campus—and eventually attracted other faculty, students, […]

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Viviana Díaz Balsera

Florida Non-FictionGold MedalLa Florida: Five Hundred Years of Hispanic Presence(University Press of Florida) edited by Viviana Díaz Balsera and Rachel A. May  Viviana Díaz Balsera was born in Cuba and raised in Puerto Rico. She received her Ph.D fromYale University and is currently Professor of Spanish at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. […]

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Bruce Cockburn

Bruce Cockburn, the award–winning songwriter and pioneering guitarist — whose life and music has been shaped by politics, protest, romance and spiritual discovery — has released 31 albums spanning five decades. In addition to selling over 7 million records, Bruce has just completed a new memoir, Rumours of Glory, which he will read from at […]

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Susan Cerulean

Susan Cerulean celebrates the ancient, present-time and future shorelines of north Florida in her new memoir, Coming to Pass: Florida’s Coastal Islands in a Gulf of Change. Her many books and collaborative anthologies include Tracking Desire: A Journey after Swallow-tailed Kites, UnspOILed: Writers Speak for Florida’s Coast; Between Two Rivers: Stories from the Red Hills […]

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Kerry O’Malley Cerra

Children’s LiteratureBronze MedalJust A Drop of Water (Sky Pony Press) by Kerry O’Malley Cerra Kerry O’Malley Cerra was born in New Jersey but moved to Florida at the age of two. She resided in Orlando until she left for college at the University of South Florida in Tampa. After graduating with a Social Science Education […]

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Robert Olen Butler

Robert Olen Butler has published fifteen novels and six volumes of short fiction, one of which, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He has also published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, From Where You Dream. He was the 2013 recipient of the F. […]

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Eden Brent

Nicknamed “Little Boogaloo” by her Mississippi Delta mentor Boogaloo Ames, with whom she apprenticed for 16 years, Eden Brent is much more than her signature boogie and blues piano riffs. She has proven to be a celebrated songwriter and dynamic performer, earning eleven Blues Music Award nominations since 2009 and winning three of those awards. […]

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Bobby Bowden

Bobby Bowden is known as much for his affable charm as he is for his championship teams. Having coached young men for seven decades, he is the winningest coach in NCAA Division 1 football history. Bowden guided Florida State University to more than 300 victories, two national championships, 12 Atlantic Coast Conference titles, finishing in […]

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