Earlier this month, Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez reversed his stance on raising property taxes. Now he wants to close almost half of our public libraries. Many of those libraries are in low-income neighborhoods, and their closure will affect poor adults who rely on the library system for online access,…
As The Dissident, J.J. Colagrande turns his critical eye on Miami culture. This week: Closing 22 libraries in Miami? You’ve gotta be kidding. Closing almost half of the city libraries is wrong on so many levels, and it’s time for a quick call-to-action to ensure that Mayor Carlos Gimenez changes…
You’ve seen them on Kourtney & Kim Take Miami, luring the hapless Scott Disick away from his baby daddy duties in favor of racing expensive cars. You’ve seen them on The Real Housewives of Miami, shmoozing with the plastic faces of Miami’s most notorious women. Or maybe you haven’t seen…
We can all agree that summer is pretty awesome. Even if you’re a “grown up” who doesn’t go to school anymore, summers are always that much sweeter than the rest of the year. And for Miamians, it can sometimes feel like summer all year round. But summertime is also hurricane…
Popular author Neil Gaiman visited Temple Judea in Coral Gables to promote his new book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. The packed house only served as a reminder of how beloved Gaiman is among readers of all ages, from kids who enjoyed Coraline to young adults and…
“When you hit rock bottom, you have nowhere to go but up.” Those are the wise words of the mother of Justin Bieber. “Beliebers” may know Pattie Mallette solely as the near-religious figure who brought Justin Bieber into this world, but little do they know about her deeper, darker past…
In 2011, while training for a marathon on the University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Riverwalk, Bianca Ramirez was brutally assaulted. The rest of her morning is a hazy memory. “It was so abrupt,” she recalls. “Being attacked came out of nowhere. I literally thought I died, waking up in bushes not…
Sometimes it’s hard to have pity for paparazzi-plagued celebrities. After all, they signed up for the gig, and they’re copiously compensated for any given troubles. But celebrities’ children are another story. It can’t be easy to read about your parents’ sex tapes, jailtime, or cheating scandals in the daily rags…
Best known locally for his controversial bestseller Madness Under the Royal Palms, about Palm Beach society’s lives of gilded desperation, author Laurence Leamer is back with another compelling read. This one covers the story of coal royalty, criminal greed, and death deep in the earth. Making an appearance at Coral…
What’s David Lynch’s next project? According to screenwriter/filmmaker Alan Greenberg, it’s his very own, long-in-limbo script, Love In Vain, inspired by/about blues legend Robert Johnson. Speaking from his home in Portland, Oregon, in advance of his appearance at Art Center/South Florida in Miami Beach this weekend, the 62-year-old Greenberg broke…
Eve Ensler’s play, The Vagina Monologues, launched a revolution. Seventeen years later, V-Day, the worldwide movement inspired by the play, has raised over 100 million dollars to help women and girls suffering from violence and discrimination. “It’s amazing; it’s an incredible movement. When I wrote it I had no idea…
When the Miami Knight Arts Challenge finalists were announced last week, it was far from surprising to see cultural vanguard and O, Miami, poetry fest organization University of Wynwood on the list. The U’s plan, should it be gifted one of the $20,000 grants, is to produce a conference devoted…
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby has seen several different interpretations, the most recent of which is Baz Luhrmann’s frantic, visually overwhelming film opening in theaters tomorrow. But each version has one thing in common: a tragic love story between Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan — one that mirrored…
Before he was an editor at the New Yorker, before his three published novels and five collections of short stories, and before he’d contributed to publications like McSweeney’s, the Paris Review, and the New York Times, Ben Greenman was just your average kid growing up in the Miami suburbs. “I…
This first weekend in May marks one of the nerdiest of all time. In addition to Iron Man 3’s opening day, you also have Saturday, May 4, which is Star Wars Day — (May the fourth be with you) and Free Comic Book Day! If you don’t love free stuff,…
If you were taking a casual stroll down Ocean Drive yesterday afternoon, you may have noticed something peculiar. Beyond the everyday array of half naked weirdos, sand-caked and sunburned tourists, and steadily inching traffic that usually molds the atmosphere of South Beach’s most popular strip, there was a less common…
O Miami is all about breaking new literary ground. That’s the defining principle of the festival, which aims to reach every citizen of Miami-Dade County with a piece of poetry. And throughout April, they’ve certainly blanketed our fair city with all things poetic. Friday’s Animal Spirits was one such groundbreaking…
Tattoos sting. So what better way to offset the pain than a serenade of spoken word and craft cocktails? That’s the premise behind Friday’s Animal Spirits event, where you can hear some epic poetry, sip some Hemingway punch, and possibly score a free tat, too. Friday evening, poet Tom Healy…
Quickly! Duck into the nearest doorway and let the stampeding hordes of poetry fiends spill palely past. If they spot you, start acting like a sport or religion and they will slowly back away, clutching their public radio tote bags to their chests and muttering, “Where is the mofongo of…
Say what you will about the drunken creeps lurking in the alleyway shadows of South Beach, but they are pretty well-read. Or at least they were this week when the O, Miami poetry festival hosted a poetry-themed edition of Bas Fisher Invitational’s Weird Miami Bus Tour. On Wednesday night, Nathaniel…
Poetry is cool shit. It’s closely connected to images of a sensitive manly man or a powerful lady heroine, and everybody wants to feel like a hero at some point in the day. And it’s at that time of day that O, Miami’s ongoing Pin Up Pop Up Poetry event…
We’ve got a pretty interesting mixed bag of characters in this town. You name it, you can find it down here, from Cuban Canadians to Mexican Ukrainians and every amalgamation in between. So it would make sense that Mark Okun, author of A Short Jew in the Body of a…
