Capó’s audience had a strong showing from FIU’s history department, from which Capó received his Ph.D. His presentation was engaging, accompanied by art, maps, newspaper clippings, and artifacts lovingly culled from the community’s past. Capó talked of postcards, shared stories, and all sorts of sources that existed outside the official archives. Capó demonstrated the ways that Miami presented its urban frontier status and closely-guarded reputation as somewhere to go to revel without consequence.
     Capó read one passage that highlighted the queer community’s resilience—the raid on the nightclub La Paloma in 1937 by nearly two hundred members of the KKK. The story highlighted the intertwining between organizations like the KKK and more institutionalized powers like law enforcement, especially given the bolstering response from the Sheriff at the time. The audience shared in Capó’s delight when he explained that after La Paloma reopened, it eventually integrated the raid into its programming as one of its shows.
     As a last note, this was certainly the longest and most engaged question and answer session I have ever seen at a Books and Books event, with the eager audience asking after more and more information. Fortunately, I’d anticipated a rush on buying the book and snagged one on the way in, because when Capó settled in to sign books, the line built up immediately.
 
          —Chazz Chitwood

      Despite the darkness of the literary material, the Books & Books event itself felt light and giddy with anticipation. Among the many attendees were friends of Josaphat’s from her alma mater, Florida International University (FIU), where she had recently received her Masters in Fine Arts; I was one of them. Dancing was Josaphat’s thesis, overseen by Les Standiford, director of the program and author of Last Train to Paradise. Opening the evening’s program, Standiford discussed what a pleasure it had been to follow Josaphat’s work, explaining that he’d first seen this project as a screenplay in a workshop but that Josaphat had insisted she came to FIU to write a novel, and she wanted to try and translate the story to that genre. Dancing was the result of that transition. As Standiford declared his admiration and pride in Josaphat’s writing and its publication, the audience responded with cheers.
     Josaphat’s voice commanded the room as she began to read an excerpt from Dancing in the Baron’s Shadow. The reading was brutal. Josaphat had chosen two passages, each focusing on one of the brothers in the novel, Raymond and Nicolas, as each faced a new low under Papa Doc’s regime. Raymond’s wife and children had left for the United States without him, while Nicolas—a professor writing dangerous propaganda against the dictatorship—was violently arrested and thrown into the infamous Fort Dimanche.
     Josaphat’s careful research shone through with piercing historical detail, creating a Port-au-Prince that was at once vivid and arresting to imagine. Despite having no prior knowledge of Duvalier’s Haiti, I felt oriented by Josaphat’s setting and descriptions. More importantly, however, I felt a twinge of sympathy for each of her characters as they faced the worst tragedies of their lives. The danger, the risk, the devastation all read clearly off the page, and when Josaphat finished I felt emotionally exhausted the way only a good book can leave you. When she closed the book and looked up at her audience, everyone applauded wildly.
     I was unable to stay for Josaphat’s question and answer session (unfortunately my parking meter didn’t last as long as I’d expected), but the amount of hands that shot up when I left showed to me that I was not the only one moved by Josaphat’s prose. By the time I returned, every single copy of Dancing in the Baron’s Shadow had been sold out—in the shocking span of fifteen minutes! I was so impressed I couldn’t even be disappointed. It would be an understatement to call this book launch a success, an auspicious start for Fabienne Josaphat’s book tour.
          —Stephanie Selander

      On February 3, Miami's literary community gathered at the opulent Olympia Theater, long a mainstay of the city's small but dedicated creative class. The event, hosted by the Downtown Arts and Science Society (DASS), drew hundreds of patrons for a dramatic reading of works by four local authors, accompanied and interpreted by an experimental jazz quartet.
     DASS's curator, author Raul Guerrero, says this is exactly the kind of "intellectual flirting" its members enjoy every month. Drawing on the concept of the salon, which flourished during the European Enlightenment and enjoyed a heyday during the Parisian jazz age of Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, DASS functions as a local social club that discusses themes ranging from science and innovation to literature and music.
     This Wednesday offering produced a conversation among many different art forms: literature, drama, music, and architecture, housed under the Olympia's gilded dome.
     Coincidentally–or perhaps not–each of the four authors chose a passage that focused on the nature of father-daughter relationships. Pairing literature with jazz–especially stories like these, turbulent re-tellings of traumatic experiences–was a natural fit. Gary Thomas and his quartet produced melodies that could please a discerning jazz lover, while setting up a dialogue with each story.
     Kicking off the evening, Chantel Acevedo read from her latest novel, The Distant Marvels. A Cuban-American author who recently returned to her native Miami as a professor in the University of Miami's English department, Acevedo chose to read the excerpt herself. Acevedo's selection looked at the protagonist's complicated relationship with her bullish father, a devout follower of Jose Martí in his fight to liberate Cuba from Spanish rule.
     Stacy Conde's The Red Speck followed. The author opted for a dramatic reading by actor Terrell Fritz, whose magnetic boom and startling tenor served her story well. Driving along on a bleakly rainy evening, father and daughter mentally spar, their secret musings heard only in their own heads - and by the audience. His anger, at first seeming to be  meant for a foolish wife, unraveled before the audience: it was his daughter he had called “a cunt,” and not the gold-digging woman he refused to divorce.
     Between Conde and Acevedo, viewers got a real sense of the difference between a  reading and a dramatic interpretation, and how they affect the way a work is consumed.  The audience was abuzz with chatter between the readings, discussing what they’d just heard.
     Understanding how persona and prose play off one another, novelist J.J. Colagrande produced a kind of virtual reality. His geeky schoolboy demeanor led the audience through a sort of video game, the protagonist cycling through the stages of teenage angst, as he read from his work-in-progress, a coming-of-age story called Reduce Heat and Continue to Boil.
     After an actor's reading of Vanessa Garcia's White Light, a story loosely based on the writer's own struggle with losing her father during an important moment of her career, the quartet strummed its final tune.
Exploring the velvety halls of Miami's oldest theater, patrons lingered for an hour longer. Some stayed for the cocktails, others for the conversation, the sound of literature buzzing in their ears.

          —Nicole Martinez

     The tone got serious for a bit, as one audience member asked Dorsey at what age he started writing, which presented the author with an opportunity to rage against the public education machine.
     “Boys are at a higher risk of becoming non-readers,” he said, “because schools make every effort to turn them off to reading with horrible curriculum. They make boys read stuff like Beowulf. It’s no wonder kids are like ‘This is what reading is? No thanks.’”
     He added that he was lucky enough to start reading authors like Vonnegut, which made him want to write.
     Dorsey was asked how, in a state known for odd news (In the last few days a guy threw an alligator at a fast food worker), he decides which stories to use and which to let go.
     “It really is an embarrassment of riches,” he said.
      Dorsey related an experience his daughter, a fast food worker herself, shared with him last year. A customer approached her counter, and he was the kind of guy we’ve all bumped into at least once in our lives, who makes every effort to let any and every person near him know exactly how important he is. Dressed head-to-toe in designer clothes and dangling a pair of $300 sunglasses from his mouth, the man loudly asked of the manager, “How much would it be for me to reserve the next franchise in this market?” Essentially saying to all around, “You may be buying the food, but I can but the restaurant.”
     After eating his meal, Daddy Warbucks approached the counter and ordered a cookie, which he paid for by removing two dollars and change from Dorsey’s daughter’s tip jar.
     Dorsey mentioned that was finishing a novel when heard this, and had to stop to make a note for his next one. Needless to say, Coconut Cowboy features an encounter eerily similar to that, only Serge and Coleman are there to witness it. Naturally, Serge refuses to let the deed go unpunished.
     That’s where he differs from his character, Dorsey says. “I have the impulse control Serge lacks,” he said. “But I still have to think these things that Serge does.”
     Dorsey calls Serge a vessel through which all of those who take the high road when faced with the rudeness Dorsey believes is pervasive in modern society can live.
     “Through Serge they are able to live out the things they would like to do.”

          —Ed Irvin