Florida Writer's Circuit

Jennifer Key

Jennifer Key, of Pinehurst, North Carolina,  has been named winner of the 2012 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. Key receives the eleventh annual prize for her manuscript entitled The Old Dominion. In addition to a $2,000 check, the award includes book publication in Spring 2013 by the University of Tampa Press. This will be Key’s first book.

Jennifer Key teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, where she serves as the editor of Pembroke Magazine. She was the 2006-2007 Diane Middlebrook Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and was educated at the University of Virginia where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. Her work has won the Poetry Center of Chicago’s Juried Reading, The Southwest Review’s McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Fiction, and Shenandoah’s Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Writers. Her poetry has appeared in The Antioch Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Callaloo,and elsewhere. 


Tampa Review judges commented that The Old Dominion “spoke to us with exceptional, insistent images and ideas—a collection of continuously engaging poems and peak experiences” in a “gorgeous debut collection.” 

“Key’s confident, self-assured voice guides the reader through both sweeping and specific landscapes,” the judges said. “The poet’s deft hand at her craft, and her keen, unexpected details make the reader perfectly comfortable on every plane.

“Yet, for all that confidence, Key reminds us that confidence and certainty are not dominion,” they wrote.  “A line from the last poem of the book reads, ‘Lord, can anyone rescue us from ourselves?’  The question remains unanswered, lingering in the reader’s mind. . . .  Fact is, the invention of everything in Key’s world—knowledge, identities, memories, even the invention of poems themselves—is under siege while safely protected in this poet’s immense talent.”

Itinerary:

Tuesday, April 2: Flagler College
Wednesday, April 3: Valencia College
Thursday, April 4: University of Tampa
Friday, April 5: College of Central Florida, Ocala
Saturday, April 6: Edison State University
Monday, April 8: Miami Dade College
Tuesday, April 9: Eckerd College
Thursday, April 11: USF

Amina Gautier--Feb 11-21, 2013

Dates and Locations listed below

Amina Gautier's Tour Dates

Miami Dade College, Miami, Monday, Feb 11

Valencia College, Orlando, Tuesday, Feb 12

College of Central Florida Wednesday, Feb 13

University of South Florida, Tampa, Thursday, Feb 14

St. Leo University, St. Leo, Friday, Feb 15

University of Tampa, Tampa, Tuesday, Feb 19

Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Wednesday, Feb 20

Edison College, Port Charlotte, Thursday, Feb 21



Amina Gautier is the winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction for her short story collectionAt-Risk. Gautier is the second African American writer to win this award in its thirty-year history. She is also a past winner of the Danahy Fiction Prize from Tampa Review. More than sixty-five of her short stories have been published and her fiction appears in African American Review, African Voices,Antioch Review, B&A: New Fiction, Cicada, Chattahoochee Review, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Iconoclast, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Nimrod,North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Opium.com, Pindeldyboz, Pleiades,Quarter After Eight, Red Rock Review, River Styx, Salt Hill, Shenandoah,Southeast Review, Southern Review, Southwest Review, Story Quarterly, StudioMagazine, Sycamore Review, Timber Creek Review, Today's Black Woman, Torch, and Yemassee among other places. She is also a writer, scholar, and professor.Following in the footsteps of the late nineteenth century African Americanintellectuals (Charles W. Chesnutt, W.E.B. DuBois, Frances E. W. Harper, andPauline Hopkins) who merged both critical and creative talents, Gautier's academic interests are two-fold. Her background as a scholar of 19th CenturyAmerican literature and, more generally, African American literature focuses on such nineteenth century American authors as Charles W. Chesnutt, Elleanor Eldridge, Benjamin Franklin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Walt Whitman. Gautier is a graduate of The Northfield Mount Hermon School(NMH), Stanford University, from which she earned both a bachelor and master's degree within four years, and the University of Pennsylvania where she received a master's degree and Ph.D. She has been a Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellow(now Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow) at Stanford University, a Fontaine Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, a Mitchem Dissertation Fellow at Marquette University, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Washington University in St.Louis. Her academic memberships include AWP, MLA, and MELUS. She is currently Assistant Professor of English at DePaul University, where she offers courses in creative writing and African American literature.