The title poem of this book records a sojourn to a small island off the Florida Panhandle. Reachable only by boat, Dog Island provides a quiet respite where Miami poet-artist Laurence Donovan contemplates the sea, sand, and sky and transforms them into words and etchings. Donald Justice, in his foreword, calls Donovan "doubly gifted" in both his poetry and his art. This volume presents both, the latter in fifteen of his etchings. He was also known for his linocuts, represented here by the small scorpion at the end of the book.

On a trip to Dog Island, Florida in 1988, Virginia found philosophical identity with an old gnarled tree growing on the mountain at her sons beach house. She incorporated this event into several of her other writings. These are her stories.

Out of the shotgun houses and deep, shaded porches of a West Florida mill town comes this extraordinary novel of love and redemption. Gabriel Catts recounts his lifelong love for his brother's wife, Myra whose own demons threaten to overwhelm all three of them. The story told in My Brother Michael is retold in Myra Sims, Janis Owens' second novel, from Myra's point of view.

This is the first in a series of collections of fiction and nonfiction about Florida by legendary writers who came here—some to escape the chilly North, some to find freedom, and some to investigate what the fuss was all about. From Audubon in 1834 to Dave Barry in 1990, these writers reveal Florida's natural beauty and her residents human foibles. In poetry, John Greenleaf Whittier exposes our shameful slave-holding past, and Elizabeth Bishop extols our turtles and sandbars and tropical rain. Jules Verne shoots a moon rocket off from Tampa, and Hunter Thompson delivers up his own gonzo brand of journalism in a story of marine salvage in the Keys. Hemingway rants about the governments laxity in the face of tragedy, while Harriet Beecher Stowe offers some advice on the time-honored practice of buying land in the Sunshine State. This anthology includes writing by of the following authors: Next in series > > See all of the books in this series

A chance meeting in the University of North Carolina campus library in 1944 began a decades-long friendship and sixty-year correspondence. Donald Justice (1925-2004) and Richard Stern (1928-2013) would go on to become, respectively, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and the acclaimed novelist. A Critical Friendship showcases a selection of their letters and postcards from the first fifteen years of their correspondence, representing the formative period in both writers' careers. It includes some of Justice's unpublished poetry and early drafts of later published poems as well as some early, never-before-published poetry by Stern. A Critical Friendship is the story of two writers inventing themselves, beginning with the earliest extant letters and ending with those just following their first major publications, Justice's poetry collection The Summer Anniversaries and Stern's novel Golk. These letters highlight their willingness to give and take criticism and document the birth of two distinct and important American literary lives. The letters similarly document the influence of teachers, friends, and contemporaries, including Saul Bellow, John Berryman, Edgar Bowers, Robert Lowell, Norman Mailer, Allen Tate, Peter Hillsman Taylor, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Yvor Winters, all of whom feature in the pair's conversations. In a broader context, their correspondence sheds light on the development of the mid-twentieth-century American literary scene.

When Donald Justice wrote in “On a Picture by Burchfield” that “art keeps long hours,” he might have been describing his own life. Although he early on struggled to find a balance between his life and art, the latter became a way of experiencing his life more deeply. He found meaning in human experience by applying traditional religious language to his artistic vocation. Central to his work was the translation of the language of devotion to a learned American vernacular. Art not only provided him with a wealth of intrinsically worthwhile experiences but also granted rich and nuanced ways of experiencing, understanding, and being in the world. For Donald Justice—recipient of some of poetry’s highest laurels, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry—art was a way of life. Because Jerry Harp was Justice’s student, his personal knowledge of his subject—combined with his deep understanding of Justice’s oeuvre—works to remarkable advantage in For Us, What Music? Harp reads with keen intelligence, placing each poem within the precise historical moment it was written and locating it in the context of the literary tradition within which Justice worked. Throughout the text runs the narrative of Justice’s life, tying together the poems and informing Harp’s interpretation of them. For Us, What Music? grants readers a remarkable understanding of one of America’s greatest poets.

From the union of the Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers at the Georgia-Florida state line, the mighty Apalachicola River flows unimpeded for about 100 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. At the river's mouth lies Apalachicola Bay and Florida's "Forgotten Coast," known for world-class seafood and seemingly endless miles of pristine beaches, shallow estuaries, and protected forests. In Apalachicola Bay, author Kevin McCarthy takes us through the history of the bays sites and communities. With vibrant color paintings by William Trotter, Apalachicola Bay will let you savor some authentic Florida history and see what makes this "Forgotten Coast" memorable for residents and visitors alike.