Diane Roberts presents
"Dream State:
Eight Generations of Swamp Lawyers, Conquistadors, Confederate Daughters, Banana Republicans, and Other Florida Wildlife"
How each new wave of Florida settlers, from the mounds of the First Peoples to modern golf courses and artificial lakes, has reinvented the state to suit themselves. We live in a state of dreams, a paradise of sun and sea breezes. We pronounce it paradise then “improve” it: mermaids at Weeki Wachee or castles in Orange County or “islands” built on fill dirt dumped into our waters.
With a storyteller’s talent for setting great scenes, acclaimed journalist and NPR commentator, Diane Roberts lays out the sweeping history of eight generations of Browards and Bradfords, Tuckers and Robertses - from Florida’s first inhabitants to those involved in the recent past.
About the Book:
Part family memoir, part political commentary, part apologia, Dream State tells the grand and sometimes crazy story of Florida through the eyes of one of its native daughters. Diane Roberts has many family secrets to tell. Roberts’s ancestors helped settle Florida, kill off its pesky Indians, enslave some of its inhabitants, clear its forests, lay its train tracks, and pave its roads, all the time weaving themselves into the very fabric of the state.
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About the Author:
Diane Roberts is a professor of English. She specializes in Southern culture and is an author, columnist, essayist, radio commentator and reviewer. She is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee, which probably explains her unhealthy fascination with Florida politics. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books, most recently Dream State, an historical memoir of her Florida family, and Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America. She lives in Tallahassee, except for the times she runs off to Great Britain, desperate for a different government to satirize. - Florida Phoenix
This program is a partnership between the Florida Humanities and Friends of Wakulla Springs State Park. Funding for this program was provided by Florida Humanities and sponsored in part by the State of Florida, Florida Department of State, Division of Arts and Culture, and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture.
