Carl Hiaasen is an American journalist and novelist. He began his career as a newspaper reporter and by the late 1970s had begun writing novels in his spare time, both for adults and for middle grade readers. Two of his novels have been made into feature films.
Susan Orlean is an American journalist, television writer, and bestselling author of The Orchid Thief and The Library Book. She has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992, and has contributed articles to many magazines including Vogue, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Outside. In 2021, Orlean joined the writing team of HBO comedy series How To with John Wilson.
Weird NJ is a semi-annual magazine that chronicles local legends, purported hauntings, ghost stories, folklore, unusual places or events, and other peculiarities in New Jersey. The magazine originated in 1989 as a newsletter sent to friends by Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman, but as it grew in popularity, it became a public magazine published twice a year. It spawned a series of books called Weird US, which chronicle oddities from individual states in the United States aside from New Jersey, which in turn led to a television series that aired on the History Channel.
Bob Shacochis is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary journalist. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.
Picayune Strand State Forest is one of 37 state forests in Florida managed by the Florida Forest Service. The 78,000-acre forest consists primarily of cypress swamps, wet pine flatwoods and wet prairies. It also features a grid of closed roads over part of it, left over from its previous land development schemes.
Resurrection Mary is a well-known Chicago area ghost story, or urban legend, of the "vanishing hitchhiker" type, a type of folklore that is known in many cultures. According to the story, the ghost resides in Resurrection Cemetery in Justice, Illinois, a few miles southwest of Chicago. Resurrection Mary is considered to be Chicago's most famous ghost.
José Gaspar, also known by his nickname Gasparilla, is an apocryphal Spanish pirate who terrorized the Gulf of Mexico from his base in southwest Florida during Florida's second Spanish period. Though details about his early life, motivations, and piratical exploits differ in various tellings, they agree that the 'Last of the Buccaneers" was a remarkably active pirate who amassed a huge fortune by taking many prizes and ransoming many hostages during his long career and that he died by leaping from his ship rather than face capture by the U.S. Navy, leaving behind his still-hidden treasure.
Paul Howard is an Irish journalist, author and comedy writer. He is best known as the creator of the cult character Ross O'Carroll-Kelly, a fictional Dublin 4 "rugby jock".
Darren Hambrick is a former American football linebacker in the National Football League (NFL) for the Dallas Cowboys, Carolina Panthers and the Cleveland Browns. He played college football at the University of Florida, before transferring to the University of South Carolina.
Adam Selzer is an American author, originally of young adult and middle grade novels, though his work after 2011 has primarily been adult nonfiction.
The culture of Florida is often different in metropolitan areas than in more rural areas. Many parts of rural northern Florida is similar to the rest of American Southern culture, particularly around the Panhandle. In the larger cities such as Miami, Orlando, and Tampa, where there has been a large number of people moving from other parts of the United States, and even other areas of the world, the culture is much more diverse, and has been heavily influenced by Caribbean, Latin American, Jewish, and European culture. Thus, modern-day Florida, from the second half of the 20th century through today, has been heavily influenced by the cultures of people moving in from foreign countries and other parts of the United States, and is often a mix of cultures, values, and ideas.
Charlie Souza is an American bass player, vocalist, musician, writer and producer. He is best known for playing bass in Mudcrutch. He is married to Barbara Benischek Souza.
Harold Gary Morse was an American billionaire and the developer, along with his father Harold Schwartz, of the active adult retirement community The Villages, Florida.
The Lightning–Panthers rivalry, also known as the Battle of Florida, is an American professional ice hockey rivalry between the Tampa Bay Lightning and the Florida Panthers. Both the Lightning and the Panthers compete in the National Hockey League (NHL)'s Atlantic Division. In past seasons, the rivalry has been recognized in a trophy known as the Governor's Cup, also called the Sunshine Cup and later the Nextel Cup Challenge.
Brian McNaught is a corporate diversity and sensitivity coach and author who specializes in LGBT issues in the workplace.
Cynthia Barnett is an American journalist who specializes in the environment. She is the author of the water books Mirage (2007), Blue Revolution (2011), Rain (2015), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the 2016 PEN/E.O. Wilson Award for Literary Science Writing from the PEN America Center, and The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans (2021).
Frederick George "Rick" Wilson is an American political strategist, media consultant, and author based in Florida. A former member of the Republican Party, he has produced televised political commercials for governors, U.S. Senate candidates, Super PACs, and corporations.
Jack Emerson Davis is an author and professor of history in Florida. He holds the Rothman Family Endowed Chair in the Humanities and teaches environmental history and sustainability studies at the University of Florida. In 2002-2003, he taught on a Fulbright award at the University of Jordan in Amman, Jordan.
The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous is a 2020 book by Harvard professor Joseph Henrich that aims to explain history and psychological variation using approaches from cultural evolution and evolutionary psychology. In the book, Henrich explores how institutions and psychology jointly influence each other over time. More specifically, he argues that a series of Catholic Church edicts on marriage that began in the 4th century undermined the foundations of kin-based society and created the more analytical, individualistic thinking prevalent in western societies.
