Beverly Coyle is the author of three novels, each set in her native state of Florida. In Troubled Waters (in part about the 1920 racial conflict in Ocoee) was The New York Times “Notable Book” selection and was listed among “The Ten Best Novels of the Year” named by the American Library Association in 1994. Beverly was a full professor at Vassar College and taught there twenty-five years. Last year she led workshops for fiction writers and playwrights at Yale University, Yale Divinity School. Her play The Smoking Gun—a comedy about three families colliding—is being work-shopped in New York City under the direction of Mr. Drew Barr. She’s recently completed A Man and A Woman and A Blackbird, a comedy set in Oviedo, Florida, on the night of a killing freeze. It will premiere “who knows when,” says the author.
Bill Maxwell first joined the St. Petersburg Times in 1994 as an editorial writer. He also wrote a twice-weekly column, In 2004, he left to teach journalism and establish a program at Stillman College in Alabama, but he returned to the Times board in August 2006.
A native of Fort Lauderdale, Bill was reared in a migrant farming family. After a short time in college and the U.S. Marine Corps, he returned to school. During his college years, he worked as an urban organizer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and wrote for several civil rights publications. He first began teaching college English in 1973 at Kennedy-King College in Chicago and continued to teach for 18 years. Before joining the Times, Bill spent six years writing a weekly column for the Gainesville Sun and The New York Times syndicate. Before that, he was an investigative reporter for the Fort Pierce Tribune, where he focused on labor and migrant farm worker affairs. In 1994, Maxwell established Role Models Foundations, Inc., a nonprofit organization that supports high school students who want to become writers.