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

     I’ve lost count of how many readings I’ve been to at Books & Books in Coral Gables. Up until last night, they’ve all been pretty much the same. Rows of foldout chairs filled with the authors’ Miami-based friends, relatives, and fans, book lovers gathered en masse, have made the sizable store feel smaller and more humid than the tropical air outside.
      Nina Romano’s reading on February 28 was nothing like this.
     There could not have been more than twenty people in attendance. The only full row was directly in front of the podium, its chairs occupied by Romano’s husband, long-time friends, and her former professor, John Dufresne. Still, before the reading even started, Romano’s excitement was as obvious as it was contagious. She moved about the room, introducing strangers to one another and offering wine and food to all with the warmth of a doting Italian grandmother. I felt cared for, welcome.
     As a host, Romano was gracious. As an author, she was grateful. The occasion for her appearance at Books & Books was to promote her latest novel, Lemon Blossoms. It is the second installment of her Wayfarer trilogy in which we are introduced to Angelica Domenico, a Sicilian girl whose idyllic life on her family’s lemon grove is jostled by loss, trauma, and desire. Romano’s gratitude was never clearer than when she announced that Lemon Blossoms is dedicated to John Dufresne, Romano’s thesis advisor while she was earning her MFA at Florida International University. It was his suggestion to embark upon the marathon of publishing a trilogy and his words of encouragement that keep Romano writing. In his introduction to her reading, Dufresne called Romano a “force of nature” in possession of what Nabakov called shamanstvo—the enchanter quality.

     I arrived at the Murder on the Beach bookstore in Delray Beach, Florida, fifteen minutes early for mystery writer Alafair Burke’s speaking engagement. I sat in my car. February 15th was a Monday, after all, and I didn’t want to be nerd-early, pretending to browse as I waited for the event to begin. At ten minutes to seven, I walked in to find the place nearly full.
     Murder on the Beach is a small mystery bookstore with blood red walls and strategically ripped crime scene tape strewn around the doorways. On Monday night, many of the floating bookshelves had been pushed into corners to make room. It was a packed house. Nearly thirty people showed up, and extra chairs had to be brought out from the back room.
     Alafair Burke is the author of two mystery book series. She is currently on a publicity tour for her latest novel, The Ex, a stand alone mystery centering around a prosecutor, Olivia Randall, whose ex-boyfriend, Jack, calls her from the police station asking for legal help. Jack is a chronically sweet man, and Olivia expects his legal trouble to be some trivial mix-up. But no, Jack stands accused of triple homicide. The novel asks the question, did Olivia ever know Jack at all?
     Many members of the audience seemed familiar with Burke’s previous novels, but some did not. Burke began the event by introducing herself and sharing her background. She was a prosecutor in Portland, Oregon, and an avid reader of mysteries. She found herself skimming any scene featuring a prosecutor. She found them to be cardboard cutouts who never contributed to the mystery. This didn’t line up with how Burke experienced prosecutorial work. Being a prosecutor was fascinating, and so she decided to try her hand at writing a mystery novel of her own. (She has some advantages here. Her father is none other than crime novelist James Lee Burke.)

      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