Staff Reports
The Matheson History Museum will host a poetry workshop with Alejandro Aguirre and a book discussion with Dr. Jason Vuic in April.
The poetry workshop is scheduled for 7 p.m. on Friday and will be on “The Poetics of Resistance in Gainesville and the States.” The workshop is a part of ARTSPEAKgnv’s Bard and Broadside: North Central Florida Poetry Festival. In the workshop, visitors will pass around a piece of paper and contribute two lines to a poem inspired by the previous contributor’s lines.
Aguirre, the workshop host, was “a finalist for the Atlanta Review’s Dan Veach Prize for Younger Poets. His poems are published or forthcoming in Rattle, I-70 Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, and Islandia Journal,” according to his website.
The book discussion with Vuic takes place at 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 20. The lecture will be on his book, “The Swamp Peddlers: How Lot Sellers, Land Scammers, and Retirees Built Modern Florida and Transformed the American Dream.” In the lecture, Vuic will discuss the history of the “installment land sales industry.”
Vuic’s book was published in 2021 and won the Phillip and Dana Zimmerman Gold Medal Prize for Florida Nonfiction at the Florida Book Awards and the Charlton Tebeau Award for outstanding general interest book from the Florida Historical Society, according to the Matheson press release.
Both events are free but require registration. You can register for the poetry workshop here and the book discussion here.