Tallahassee’s Word of South Festival kicks off Friday evening with a sold out concert in the Adderley Amphitheater at Cascades Park. The concert features a mashup of the Violent Femmes and the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra.
Dozens of musicians and authors will appear together on various stages all weekend, and most events are free.
The annual festival of music and literature was created over a decade ago by Tallahassee attorney and author Mark Mustian. He will be onstage discussing his new novel, Boy With Wings, joined by Parliament-Funkadelic keyboardist Daniel Bedrosian.
We speak to several featured authors on this week’s Speaking Of.
Shonda Knight
Former Tallahassee TV news anchor Shonda Knight will discuss her new children’s book, My Omnilocks, inspired by her daughter.
“She wanted me to straighten her hair for the (father daughter) dance, and the weather that day was just not conducive for hair of our texture to be straight,” Knight says. “She felt defeated.”
“I took it as an opportunity to really pour into her, and I just started telling her why her hair was so special,” Knight says. “It can be curly one day, it can be straight the next. You can braid it. You can lock it. It’s so versatile.”
From that conversation, Knight wound up with an interactive board book geared toward young children.
“I knew the concept from the beginning would be that there would be a face, and as you turn the pages, the hairstyle would change on that same face on the back cover,” Knight says. YouTube helped her figure out how to print and self-publish the book.
Knight, Executive Director of Community and Media Relations for the Leon County Sheriff’s Office, is now on a book tour sponsored by McDonald’s. She’s visiting some of the fast food restaurants around Florida and also taking the book into Title 1 schools.
Kristen Arnett
Author Kristen Arnett is making her second Word of South appearance for her new novel, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One. It’s about a lesbian birthday party clown. “You know, that classic story,” she laughs.
The book is about an Orlando woman who “is trying to take her artistry, which is clowning, to the next level.” Arnette says. “So she is kind of bumbling through life in this messy kind of way but at the same time trying to make art in a capitalist society.”
Arnett’s work has appeared in many major outlets like TIME, Oprah Magazine, The New York Times, and PBS Newshour.
“I say usually I write about gay Florida, specifically gay central Florida. I consider myself very much to be a place writer.”
Arnett says any of her work is steeped in Florida, “like a very strong tea maybe. But I am always very interested in writing about central Florida in the ways that people don’t necessarily see… If your brain is already thinking theme parks (or) Florida Man ( or) the government that we have in Florida, then here’s a little magnifying glass on a place of Florida that maybe somebody who’s not from here gets to take a peek inside of.”
Craig Pittman
Craig Pittman is a podcaster, best-selling author, and award-winning journalist. He spent much of his career covering environmental stories for the Tampa Bay Times.
He’s written about Florida’s wealth of quirkiness, like “a religious cult that smuggled Giant African Land Snails in because they thought drinking the mucus would make you healthy,” Pittman says. “It actually had the opposite effect.” By the way, these snails are also good at eating stucco off your house.
Pittman has written seven non-fiction books. The latest is Welcome to Florida: True Tales from America’s Most Interesting State. “If you’re new to Florida, and every day we get 900 new people who move here and don’t know what they’ve gotten themselves into, grab this book and it’ll teach you some stuff.”
Pittman says he is still making money from his nearly decade-old book, Oh, Florida!: How America’s Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country. “The point of that book is, yes we are weird, but we are also more than that. And if you just think we’re weird, you’re making a big mistake.”
Click LISTEN above to hear this entire segment of Speaking Of.
