The 20th Annual Tampa Bay Times Festival of Reading is this Saturday, October 20th, at the USF St. Petersburg campus from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
While well-known authors like Dennis Lehane (speaking at the University Student Center at 10 a.m.) and Michael Grunwald (University Student Center at 2:30 p.m.) will present their latest works, three local figures profiled on this week's University Beat on WUSF 89.7 will also be speaking.
- Peter Meinke (USF Science & Tech building, room 124, at 1:00 p.m.) is St. Petersburg's Poet Laureate, a fellow in the Florida Studies Program at USF St. Pete and author of seven books, including The Shape of Poetry: A Practical Guide to Writing and Reading Poems. "It’s just like, if you’re interested in music, you can appreciate better if you know more about the instruments and that sort of thing, so I go into some detail particularly about formal poetry, but it’s written in a way that anybody could understand."
- Karen Brown (Poynter Institute-Haiman Amphitheater at 11:45 a.m.) teaches creative writing in the English Department at USF Tampa. She's also the author of Little Sinners, a collection of short stories, as well as a novel, The Longings of Wayward Girls, which is scheduled to be published next summer. She advises her students, as well as any would-be author to "read a lot daily, write daily if they can, and don't quit, because it takes years for your style to evolve and it just takes time to find publication."
- Nick Fagnoni (FWC Fish & Wildlife Research Institute at 11:45 a.m.) is general manager of the Barnes & Noble Bookstore on USF's Tampa campus. He'll be talking about the growing field of e-books and e-readers. "That’s probably so much of the whole e-book story is, you know, you’re not sure at first and ‘I’m never gonna give it up,’ and a lot of those tried-and-true book people who love the feel, love the texture, think it’s great, because now they have thousands of books at their fingertips.”
