A literature with saltwater in it
Florida's shelf runs deep — and it was never merely regional.
Every state has a literature; few have a mythology. Florida's writers have been working theirs for a century — the frontier hammock and the theme-park parking lot, the springs and the sprawl, thirteen hundred miles of coastline and everything that washes up on it. Zora Neale Hurston wrote Eatonville into the American canon. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings made a scrub-country orphan's year the stuff of a Pulitzer. Elizabeth Bishop kept a house in Key West and let the water into the poems.
The tradition has never slowed. The state's university and independent presses sustain a nonfiction shelf that most regions would envy, while its novelists and poets keep arriving on national shortlists with books that could have been written nowhere else. And because Florida is a hemispheric state, its literature is bilingual as a matter of course.
Not one Florida but several
The Florida a book comes out of is not one place. It is the Panhandle piney woods and the citrus belt, the Cuban and Haitian and Nicaraguan Miamis, the Puerto Rican Orlando, the Bahamian Key West, the retirement counties along the Gulf, and the working ports at Tampa and Jacksonville. A jury that reads Florida honestly has to hold all of this at once.
The Florida Medal is the mechanism by which we do so. It is added recognition, not a separate contest. Every entry by a Florida-based author or press is considered for it automatically. No extra fee, no separate form, no thumb on the scale.
A prize at an intersection
A prize administered from Florida is not a provincial exercise. It is positioned at one of American literature's busiest intersections — South and Caribbean, English and Spanish, conservation and development, memory and invention.
The shelf is long. This year's additions are being written right now. We intend to read them.