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2009 Festival Author Biographies

 

 

 
Ray Arsenault
   Photo: Graham Photography
Raymond Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History and co-director of the Florida Studies Program at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg.  A graduate of Princeton and Brandeis, he is the author of Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, which was named an Editor's Choice by the TBR, a Best Books selection by the Washington Post, and won the Owsley Prize of the Southern Historical Association as the best book published in the field of Southern history in 2006.

 
Bob Bass
   Photo: Tamar Hurwitz

Josh Bazell holds a BA in English Literature and writing from Brown University and an MD from Columbia. Currently a resident at the University of California, San Francisco, he wrote Beat the Reaper (his first novel) while completing his internship at a hospital not at all like the one described in the book.

To read the Times' review of Beat the Reaper, click here.

 
Olivia Gentile
   Photo: Deborah Copaken Kogan

Olivia Gentile was a reporter for The Hartford Courant, in Connecticut, and The Rutland Herald, in Vermont.  She grew up in Washington, D.C., graduated from Harvard, and has a master's of fine arts degree in writing from Columbia, where she also took courses in ornithology.  She was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in 2006.  She lives in New York City with her husband, Andy Borowitz.  This is her first book.  For more information visit www.oliviagentile.com. 

To read the Times' review of Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds, click here.


 
Lederer
   

Richard Lederer is the author of more than 30 books about language, history, and humor, including his best-selling Anguished English series and his current books, A Treasury for Dog Lovers and A Treasury for Cat Lovers.  He has been profiled in magazines as diverse as The New Yorker, People and the National Enquirer and frequently appears on radio as a commentator on language.

Dr. Lederer's syndicated column, "Looking at Language," appears in newspapers and magazines throughout the United States.  He has been named International Punster of the Year and Toastmasters International's Golden Gavel Winner.


 
Carrie McLaren
   
Carrie McLaren is the founder of the now defunct Stay Free! magazine (www.stayfreemagazine.org).  A longtime blogger, she is currently at Consumerist, a website owned by the publishers of Consumer Reports.  She is the curator of Adult Education, a "useless lecture series" based in Brooklyn, New York (www.adult-ed.net).  In a previous life, she organized the Illegal Art Exhibit, a travelling multimedia art show and website devoted to copyright reform (www.illegal-art.org).  A former advertising columnist for the Village Voice, her writing has also appeared in Newsday, Mother Jones, Time Out NY, and SPIN magazine, among others.  Carrie lives in Brooklyn with one each of husband, son and cat.

 
Cousin Brucie
   
  "Cousin Brucie" Morrow, a veritable legend in broadcast history, is the only on-air personality in New York City to have a street named after him, and he was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1988, Broadcasting and Cable's Hall of Fame in 1990, and National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2001.  His autobiography, entitled Cousin Brucie: My Life in Rock and Roll Radio was a bestseller as was his classic Doo Wop: The Music, the Times, the Era.  "Cousin Brucie" recently signed another long-term contract with Sirius XM Radio, so fans can listen to their favorite broadcaster three times a week.

 
Janis Owens
   

Janis Owens is a novelist, memoirist, folklorist and premier storyteller.  She is a native of West Florida, born in Marianna in 1960, the last child and only daughter of an Assembly of God preacher who later became a salesman for the Independent Life Insurance Company.  As a child, her family lived briefly in Louisiana and Mississippi, and then returned to North Florida, where she graduated from the University of Florida, and was a student of Harry Crews' Creative Writing Workshop.  She is the award-winning author of three acclaimed novels: My Brother Michael, winner of the Chautauqua South Fiction Award for Best Novel, Myra Sims, and most recently, The Schooling of Claybird Catts.  Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Writer's Digest, and many other publications.  Author Pat Conroy has called her, "one of the finest novelists of our time."

Her new book is The Cracker Kitchen: A Cookbook in Celebration of Cornbread-Fed, Down-Home Family Stories and Cuisine.  Part-cookbook, part family-memoir, Cracker Kitchen celebrates the backwoods resilience of a much maligned section of Southern culture: the hapless, toothless Cracker.  Janis traces the roots of the word back to its origins and offers a refreshing anthropological exploration of this group of proud, fiercely independent Americans who have a deep love of their families, country, stories and food.  Intertwined with their history is the history of her own beloved Cracker family: Grannie, Granddaddy, Uncles and Cousins-in-law, complete with pictures from her family album and many a hilarious family story.

She can be reached at her website: janisowens.com.

To read a profile of Janis Owens by the Times Lifestyles Editor Janet Keeler, click here.

Back to list of authors
 
Craig Pittman
   
Craig Pittman is a native Floridian.  He graduated from Troy State University in Alabama, where his muckraking work for the student paper prompted an agitated dean to label him "the most destructive force on campus".  Since then he has covered a variety of newspaper beats and quite a few natural disasters, including hurricanes, wildfires, and the Florida Legislature.  Since 1998 he has reported on environmental issues for the Times.  His work won the Waldo Proffitt Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism in Florida in 2004, 2006 and 2007, and a series of stories on Florida's vanishing wetlands that he wrote with Matthew Waite won the top investigative reporting award in both 2006 and 2007 from the Society of Environmental Journalists.  He lives in St. Petersburg with his wife and two children.

Matthew Waite, 34, is the developer of PolitiFact and a news technologist at the St. Petersburg Times, where he combines journalism with programming to create new products for the Times and its Web site, tampabay.com.

 
Fabiola Santiago
   

Fabiola Santiago is author of the debut novel Reclaiming Paris, a story set in contemporary Miami to the backdrop of the city's Cuban culture and history.  Published by Simon & Schuster and chosen for a Mariposa Award as Best First Book at the International Latino Book Awards of 2009, Reclaiming Paris was translated into Spanish and debuted this summer as Siempre Paris

Born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1959, Fabiola grew up enamored of her family's nostalgic stories and the memory of the softest sands and the bluest beach in the world, Varadero.  Exiled to the United States in 1969 with her family on one of the historic Freedom Flights, Fabiola has been a writer and editor for The Miami Herald since 1980.  Her award-winning stories and essays on arts, culture and identity have been published in several magazines and anthologies in the United States and abroad.  She was the founding city editor and managing editor of the Spanish-language El Nuevo Herald from 1987 to 1993, and in 2001, shared in a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the federal government seizure of the child Elian Gonzalez.  A graduate of the University of Florida, Fabiola is The Miami Herald's visual arts writer.  Read more about her work at www.reclaimingparis.com and www.fabiolasantiago.com.

To read the Times' review of Reclaiming Paris, click here.

 
Tony Silvia
   
Tony Silvia's professional background is in television news, having worked as a consumer reporter and news anchor at various television stations in local markets.  He also produced a series of media issues programs for PBS and worked as a correspondent for CNN, based in Atlanta.  He is Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.  His work for CNN's science-technology features unit was recognized nationally by an award from the Broadcast Education Association.  He has three Emmy Awards and an Associated Press Award for best documentary.  Fathers and Sons in Baseball Broadcasting (2009) is his fourth book.  The three others are: Student Television in America: Channels of Change (1998), Global News: Perspectives on the Information Age (2001), and Baseball Over the Air: The National Pastime on the Radio and in the Imagination (McFarland, 2007).  A fifth book, Power Performance: Storytelling for Multimedia Journalists, will be published by Blackwell of Oxford, England in 2010.