Arlo Haskell is an American author, publisher, and literary organizer.
Arlo Haskell is an American author, publisher, and literary organizer.
Arlo Haskell was born and raised in Key West, Florida, where his mother, Monica Haskell, was director of the Key West Literary Seminar during the late 1980s and early 1990s. [1] [2] Haskell attended Bard College in the late 1990s, where he studied poetry and was a student of John Ashbery. [3] [4] After college, he worked for David Wolkowsky, ferrying guests to Wolkowsky's private island and doing other odd jobs. [5] [2]
In 2017, Haskell authored and published his first work of nonfiction, The Jews of Key West: Smugglers, Cigar Makers, and Revolutionaries (1823–1969) (Sand Paper Press). Critics generally praised the social history for its depth of research and style, arguing that it had filled gaps in regional Florida history and in American Jewish history. [6] [7] [8] [9] In a review for the Journal of the Southern Jewish Historical Society, Raymond Arsenault remarked that it "introduces a fascinating cast of characters, revealing a unique saga of Jewish community life that no previous historian has chronicled." [10] The Jews of Key West won the Phillip and Dana Zimmerman Gold Medal for Florida Nonfiction from the Florida Book Awards and a President's Medal from the Florida Authors and Publishers Association. [11] [12] Haskell is also the author of the poetry collection, Joker (Sand Paper Press, 2009). [13] [14]
Haskell is the publisher of Sand Paper Press, a small press he founded in 2003, where he has frequently collaborated with poet and translator Stuart Krimko. [2] [15] [16] Publications include The Last Books of Héctor Viel Temperley (2011), which was translated from Spanish by Krimko and named a BOMB Editor's Choice. [17] Another Sand Paper title, Harry Mathews's The New Tourism (2010), was co-edited by Haskell and selected as a "Book of the Year" by The Times Literary Supplement . [18] [3]
Haskell is executive director of Key West Literary Seminar, the nonprofit organization whose annual writers' conference has been held since 1983. [19] [20] His career with the organization began in 2008, when he led the digitization of its extensive audio archive. [21] [22] Since his promotion to executive director in 2015, Haskell has increased the organization's scholarship program, launched a literary walking tour of Key West, and created writing programs for local high school students. [2] In 2019, he led the organization in its $1.2 million purchase of the former home of poet Elizabeth Bishop. [23]
On June 4, 2019, Haskell was named by city proclamation the Poet Laureate of Key West by the Mayor, Vice Mayor and Board of Commissioners of Key West. [24]
In 2020, Haskell co-founded the Key West Committee for Safer, Cleaner Ships, a nonprofit group that fought successfully to establish the first-ever regulations for cruise ships in Key West. [25] As the group's treasurer, he helped organize a citizens' initiative that placed three referendums with proposed amendments to the city charter for a popular vote. [26] Key West's voters approved the amendments by wide margins on November 3, 2020, resulting in limits on the size of cruise ships that may call and the number of persons that may disembark each day. [27]
Haskell was the committee's primary spokesman during the political campaign, in which the cruise industry secretly financed a dark money group that lobbied against the measures using fearmongering and disinformation tactics. [28] [29] [30] He was also an expert witness in the committee's legal defense of the referendums in Federal and State court. [31] [32] [33]
Since their passage, the charter amendments have been cited as an inspiration by others seeking to regulate cruise ships in places including Bar Harbor, Maine, the Cayman Islands, and Juneau, Alaska. [34] [35] [26]
Key West is an island in the Straits of Florida, within the U.S. state of Florida. Together with all or parts of the separate islands of Dredgers Key, Fleming Key, Sunset Key, and the northern part of Stock Island, it constitutes the City of Key West.
John Lawrence Ashbery was an American poet and art critic.
MS St. Louis was a diesel-powered passenger ship properly referred to with the prefix MS or MV, built by the Bremer Vulkan shipyards in Bremen for HAPAG, better known in English as the Hamburg America Line. The ship was named after the city of St. Louis, Missouri. Her sister ship, MS Milwaukee, was also a diesel powered motor vessel owned by the Hamburg America Line. St. Louis regularly sailed the trans-Atlantic route from Hamburg to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and New York City, and made cruises to the Canary Islands, Madeira, Spain; and Morocco. St. Louis was built for both transatlantic liner service and for leisure cruises.
Bricha, also called the Bericha Movement, was the underground organized effort that helped Jewish Holocaust survivors escape Europe post-World War II to the British Mandate for Palestine in violation of the White Paper of 1939. It ended when Israel declared independence and annulled the White Paper.
Carnival Fascination, originally Fascination, was a Fantasy-class cruise ship built at Helsinki, Finland in 1994. For most of her service with Carnival Cruise Lines she operated out of San Juan, Puerto Rico. In 2017 Carnival Fascination was chartered to the US Government to assist with hurricane relief work in the Virgin Islands. During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic the ship was withdrawn from service and in November that year sold for conversion to a hotel ship for Century Harmony Cruise Ltd, that renamed her Century Harmony. However, in October 2021 she was sold for scrapping, arriving at Gadani, Pakistan as Y Harmony in February 2022.
Port Canaveral is a cruise, cargo, and naval port in Brevard County, Florida, United States. The port has the busiest cruise terminals in the world. In 2022, the port had over 4 million passengers passing through it during the fiscal year. Additionally, over 5.4 million tonnes of bulk cargo moves through each year.
Ted Arison was an Israeli businessman who co-founded Norwegian Cruise Lines in 1966 with Knut Kloster and soon left to form Carnival Cruise Lines in 1972.
The Mule Keys are a group of scattered islets in the Florida Keys in Monroe County, Florida, United States. They are between 3 and 12 mi west of Key West, separated from it by the Northwest Channel. On the west, they are separated from the Marquesas Keys by the 6-mile (9.7 km) wide Boca Grande Channel. They belong to the outlying islands of the Florida Keys. Administratively, they are an unincorporated area of Monroe County. The islets are part of the Key West National Wildlife Refuge. The area of the islets totals 1.07 sq mi (2.8 km2), of which 1.02 sq mi (2.6 km2) are land area and 0.05 sq mi (0.13 km2) inland water bodies. The islets are uninhabited except for Mule Key, for which the census of 2000 lists one housing unit with a population of two.
The Key West Literary Seminar is a writers' conference and festival held each January in Key West, Florida. It draws an international audience for readings, panel discussions, and workshops.
"The Idea of Order at Key West" is a poem written in 1934 by modernist poet Wallace Stevens. It is one of many poems included in his book, Ideas of Order. It was also included in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
The seventh USS Wasp was the former yacht Columbia, purchased by the U.S. Navy and converted to an armed yacht serving from 1898 to 1919, with service in the Spanish–American War and World War I.
The history of the Jews in South Florida dates back to the 19th century. Many South Florida Jews are Ashkenazi, and Latin American. Many are also French, Moroccan, Syrian, Bukharan, and Israeli. There is a significant Sephardic and Mizrachi population as well.
David William Wolkowsky was a real estate developer from Key West, Florida. He is credited with transforming the city from a navy town to a tourist destination.
Judith Elizabeth Kazantzis was a British poet and political and social activist.
Eleanor Jane Miller Laino was an American poet, author of Girl Hurt (1995). She had a new collection, Cracking Open, forthcoming before her death.
The San Carlos Institute, also known as the San Carlos, is a Cuban heritage center and museum located at 516 Duval Street in Key West, Florida. The institute was founded in 1871 by members of the Cuban exile community with the goal of preserving and promoting the language, cultural values, and patriotic ideals of the Cuban people. Today, the San Carlos Institute is a multi-purpose facility that functions as a museum, library, school, conference center, theater, and art gallery for the Key West community. The institute maintains several permanent installations related to Cuban history and hosts a number of popular cultural and artistic events.
The Port of Key West is a port in Key West, Florida. It includes Key West Bight, Garrison Bight at City Marina, as well as three docks that could be utilized by cruise ships.
The Paper Brigade was the name given to a group of residents of the Vilna Ghetto who hid a large cache of Jewish cultural items from YIVO, saving them from destruction or theft by Nazi Germany. Established in 1942 and led by Abraham Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski, the group smuggled books, paintings and sculptures past Nazi guards and hid them in various locations in and around the Ghetto. After the Ghetto's liquidation, surviving members of the group fled to join the Jewish partisans, eventually returning to Vilna following its liberation by Soviet forces. Recovered works were used to establish the Vilna Jewish Museum and then smuggled to the United States, where YIVO had re-established itself during the 1940s. Caches of hidden material continued to be discovered in Vilna into the early 1990s. Despite losses during both the Nazi and Soviet eras, 30–40 percent of the YIVO archive was preserved, which now represents "the largest collection of material about Jewish life in Eastern Europe that exists in the world".
The Florida Book Awards are a set of annual statewide literary awards that recognize Floridian authors and books about Florida published in the previous year. Established in 2006, the awards are administered by the Florida State University Libraries, with co-sponsors including the Florida Humanities Council, Florida Center for the Book, the State Library and Archives of Florida, and the Florida Historical Society.