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…
After Miami’s own Richard Blanco took the podium at Obama’s inauguration earlier this year, our pretty city definitely scored itself a little more cred when it comes to the written word. Lucky for those of us who are into literature, after a one-year absence, the O, Miami Poetry Festival is…
Forget everything you think you know about the history of our sunny state — ’cause it’s all a bunch of bullsh*t. What lies beneath the pristine beaches, sweeping mansions, and roller coasters is a whole lot darker. That’s the premise behind former journalist and author TD Allman’s new book, Finding…
Richard Blanco is tired. Sitting in the lobby of the Adrienne Arsht Center’s Ziff Ballet Opera House, where he’ll take the stage tomorrow in a free reading, he apologizes for his gravelly voice, strained after a long day of media appearances and interviews like this one. “I’m starting to feel…
For Twi-hards everywhere, there’s only one deity worth worshiping, and she’s a brown-haired, Mormon mother of three from Hartford, Connecticut. We’re speaking, of course, of Stephanie Meyer, New York Times bestselling author and instigator of the biggest mass psychosis since the re-election of George W. Bush. Meyer, unarguably one of…
Yesterday, TMZ reported that an ultra-rare first edition of O.J. Simpson’s “hypothetical” recount of the gruesome 1994 double-murder of ex-wife Nicole Brown and her lover, Ron Goldman, had hit the metaphorical shelves of eBay. Our first (and, really, only) question is: Who the f*ck cares? What’s next? A reprint of…
If you’re like most of the population these days, your attention span has probably dwindled down to nothing. Between tweets, status updates, and all kinds of little flashing messages popping up on T.V., you can barely take in a whole movie–let alone a book.Well, if you’re trying to restore some…
A monster corporation edging out a locally owned business — it’s a tale as old as You’ve Got Mail. (Hey, remember when AOL was culturally relevant?) Coconut Grove’s quaint cafe/bookseller, Bookstore in the Grove, is the latest to face this modern fate. Luckily, the iconic local spot isn’t closing entirely,…
Since President Obama’s announcement that he was chosen as the 2013 inaugural poet, Richard Blanco has become poetry’s most talked about name. But though he’s scheduled to read on one of the biggest stages for poets in the nation — the upcoming presidential inauguration — he hasn’t forgotten his roots…
Richard Blanco is living the dream. The American dream, that is. An immigrant from Spain and son of Cuban exiles, Blanco began his career as a poet in Miami, the city where he was raised. Now, President Barack Obama has chosen him as the poet for his inauguration this month,…
Doomsday preachers, sidewalk psychics, and apocalypse junkies have been predicting the end of times for hundreds of years. And yet, we’re all still here, going about our daily drudgery without a hint of fire or brimstone. But what if the Mayans were actually on to something, and the end of…
Next month will mark one year since the death of journalist, polemicist and bon vivant Christopher Hitchens. Though the loss of the Hitch has been hard for his legion fans who fed lustily on his dispatches from around the world, few could have felt it more deeply than his best…
