Florida Non-Fiction
Gold Medal
La 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. She specializes in Hispanic Early Modern Studies and is the author of The Pyramid Under the Cross:Franciscan Discourses of Evangelization in Sixteenth-Century Mexico and Calderón y las quimeras de la Culpa, a book about ethics, poetics and religion in seventeenth-century Spain.In her teaching and her academic writing, Díaz Balsera strives to think about the past by listening closely to what it tells us about our present.