CAS News
USF professors win 2016 Florida Book Awards
[04.13.2017]
TAMPA, Fla. - The Florida Book Awards announced two University of
South Florida Department of English professors as 2016 Florida Book Award
Winners. Professor Jay Hopler won the gold medal in poetry for “The
Abridged History of Rainfall” (McSweeney’s Publishing). Professor Ira
Sukrungruang won the bronze metal in general fiction for “The Melting
Season” (Burlesque Press).
Coordinated by the Florida State University Libraries, the Florida Book
Awards is the nation’s most comprehensive state book awards program. It was
established in 2006 to celebrate the best Florida literature. Authors must
be full-time Florida residents, except in the Florida nonfiction and visual
arts categories, where the subject matter must focus on Florida. For its
11th annual competition, more than 200 eligible publications were submitted
across the 10 categories of competition.
The winning authors from across the state will be honored at the Abitz
Family Dinner, the annual awards banquet, which will take place in
Tallahassee on April 12, 2017, at the Mission San Luis. The public is
invited to attend. More information will be available on the Florida Book
Awards website.
Juries of three members, each nominated from across the state by
co-sponsoring organizations, read the submissions for the 2016 awards.
Jurors are authorized to select up to three medalists (including one gold
winner, one silver runner-up and one bronze medalist) in each of the 10
categories; jurors are also authorized to make no selections in a given
year.
The Florida State University Libraries coordinate the Florida Book Awards
with assistance from co-sponsors, including the Florida Center for the
Book, the State Library and Archives of Florida, the Florida Historical
Society, the Florida Humanities Council, the Florida Literary Arts
Coalition, the Florida Library Association, the Florida Association for
Media in Education, the Center for Literature and Theatre at Miami Dade
College, the Florida Chapter of the Mystery Writers of America, Friends of
FSU Libraries, the Florida Writers Association, the Florida Literacy
Coalition and “Just Read, Florida!”
Learn more about the Florida Book Awards at floridabookawards.lib.fsu.edu.
For more information on USF's creative writing program in the Department of
English, contact program director Rita Ciresi at rciresi@usf.edu.
The University of South Florida’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative
Writing is a graduate-level program offering concentrations in poetry,
fiction and creative nonfiction. The program emphasizes the craft of
writing and concentrates on students’ original work. For more
information, see
http://english.usf.edu/graduate/concentrations/cw/degrees/.
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