Poems: Readings from New Books

Beatriz F. Fernandez is an award-winning poet and a university Reference Librarian. She was the grand prize winner of Writer's Digest 2nd Annual Poetry Award competition and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2014. Her new chapbook of poetry is Shining From a Different Firmament (Finishing Line Press).

Laura McDermott is the founder and executive director of Orange Island Arts Foundation and an assistant professor at Broward College. She received her MFA degree in Creative Writing from Florida International University. She was the Girls' Club 2014-2015 Writer-in-Residence. As a member of the Miami Poetry Collective, her poetry is regularly featured in its Cent Journal Series: A Modern Anthology of Miami Poets, and her writing has also appeared in Screw Iowa!; the Virginia Key website; The Selected Collective: Volume VIII of Tigertail, a South Florida Poetry Annual; and Poets&Artists. McDermott’s debut collection is Visions on Alligator Alley (Lominy Books), an ekphrastic story-in-verse inspired by the 2015 Girls’ Club Fort Lauderdale gallery exhibit “The Moment. The Backdrop. The Persona.” Poems inspired by artwork from the exhibit depict a story through verse as well as by visual landscape. Laura McDermott traces the journey of a Florida woman who struggles with the overwhelmingly masculine world she lives in, and with feelings of desire, longing, and deep mourning.

Oscar Fuentes a.k.a. The Biscayne Poet, is a multidisciplinary artist living in Miami and the front man for the Oscar Fuentes Combo, which blends his beat-poetry with Latin Jazz fusion. His latest collection, Vagabond: Selected Poems, Short Stories, and Plays (Lulu.com), is, according to poet Michael Hettich, “Simultaneously attuned to the visceral textures of everyday life in Miami and to the fantasies and desires that guide our seeking selves . . .”