Born in Brooklyn, NY and raised in Miami Beach, Levine graduated from the University of Colorado in Boulder (BS in journalism) and the University of Florida (MAJC) in Mass Communications. She lives in Gainesville, where she is actively involved in many charitable and service organizations. She’ll be appearing at Word of South as part of our panel of non-fiction Florida Book Award winners.

He is the author of a major treatise on the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution. Making Sense of Search and Seizure Law: A Fourth Amendment Handbook (Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, 2d ed., 2015). He is also the editor and commentator on a collection of his great-great grandfather’s 117 Civil War letters. An Iowa Soldier Writes Home: The Civil War Letters of Private Daniel J. Parvin (Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, 2011).

He is currently retired in Miami and is writing a memoir for his son and grandchildren. He and his wife Martha recently celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary.

Abimbola’s first full-length poetry collection, Saltwater Demands a Psalm, was published by Graywolf Press in 2023. In 2022, the début collection was selected by Tyehimba Jess to receive the Academy of American Poets’ First Book Award. His work has received the “Indie Next Award” from the Association of American Booksellers. Most recently, Saltwater was awarded the Nossrat Yassini First Book Award, selected by Camille Dungy.

He has worked as a teaching artist for the literary nonprofit Inside Out Literary Arts and lectured in English and Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. Abimbola is presently a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Tampa. He began writing after many nights spent listening to the folktales his grandfather told of life in Gambia and Sierra Leone. His work strives to recreate the intimacy and urgency of West African oral poetry. He’ll be appearing at Word of South as part of our panel of Florida Book Award fiction and poetry winners.

Ely is also an author. She began by being a guest writer at Visit Tallahassee. She writes at Medium.com and has been a contributor author for Tallahassee Women Magazine helping women manage their finances. She’ll be discussing her new book, 100 Things Tallahassee as part of our Bicentennial Panel at this year’s Word of South.

Reed began writing fiction as a byproduct of his teaching and research. A handful of his literature classes required students to craft stories that filled out aspects of the lives of minor characters in the novels they were studying. Reed joined right in with the workshops, producing what became his first published fiction. Later, while researching a book on Robert Louis Stevenson, he discovered that the Scottish writer’s dark story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde had once been suspected of inspiring Jack the Ripper. Reed’s debut novel, Seeking Hyde (2018), dealt with the origins and unanticipated impact of Stevenson’s masterpiece and was named as a finalist for the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award for Historical Fiction.

His second novel, Pocketful of Poseys, draws more broadly on his experience growing up in an academic family; his education at Yale, the University of Virginia, and as a Fulbright Fellow at Oxford; years spent living in Rome and Christchurch, N.Z.; circum-global travels with his wife and children, and courageous decisions made by his mother-in-law as she faced her death. He and wife Dottie now split their year between Sarasota, Florida, and Camp Pemigewassett, a summer camp for boys in New Hampshire. He’ll be appearing at Word of South as part of our panel of Florida Book Award fiction and poetry award winners.