The Humanities Series is our gift to the community.
 

Retired trial judge-turned-author Fredric M. Hitt has completed a trilogy of historical novels dealing with the stories of the Timucuan Indians and their early encounters with European settlers. His first and second novels, Wekiva Winter and Beyond the River of the Sun received the Florida Historical Society’s coveted Patrick D. Smith Award as Best Fiction for 2006 and 2008 respectively. Hitt is the only author to be honored twice with the Society's literary award. His most recent novel, The Last Timucuan tells the heart-rending story of the events that led to the extinction of the first Floridians. In his Humanities Series presentation, Hitt will share his unique insights about the relationship between Florida’s natives and the earliest European settlers in our state.

Born and raised in Clay County, Frank Thomas is a native Floridian whose ancestors came to Florida in the late eighteenth century. His family’s direct connection with the land, his strong Florida heritage, and his love of Florida inspired much of his music. Early in his career, Frank toured nationally with the Arkansas Travelers playing rhythm guitar. He has written over five hundred songs about Florida and recorded nine albums including Cracker Nights, Florida Stories, Bingo!, Spanish Gold, and Just Another Day. Frank has hosted a weekly singer-songwriter radio show for WMNF-FM in the Tampa area, created an award-wining video entitled "Florida History in Song," and performed before audiences throughout the state and, with the help of his wife, Lisa (who will participate in this presentation), continues the rich tradition of passing on Florida history through storytelling in song.

Mary Fears, a graduate of Bethune-Cookman University and Florida State University, is a professional storyteller, a Civil War reenactor, a genealogist, and the author of four books, including insightful looks at the lives of slaves during the last half of the 19th century. She prefers to tell stories based upon historic documents, rather than fictionalized enactments. Beyond her performances, Mary has written and directed plays. For over thirty years, she has presented stage performances in numerous venues, including schools, churches, colleges, museums, and historic sites. She is committed to telling African-American history stories for the education of all listeners.

Raymond Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg. A graduate of Princeton University and Brandeis University, where he received his Ph.D., he has been heralded as an accomplished, prize-winning author. He is a specialist in the political, social, and environmental history of the American South. Among his extensive list of writing credits, in 2006, he published Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Oxford University Press). According to Eric Foner in the New York Times Book Review, “Arsenault brings vividly to life a defining moment in modern American history (and) rescues from obscurity the men and women who, at great personal risk, rode public buses into the South in order to challenge segregation.” This important historical retrospective will be the basis of the author’s Emerson Center debut.

Andrew Huse is a librarian and historian with interest in oral history, social history, the state of Florida, and culinary history. He has written numerous articles in magazines and academic journals, and has recently completed a centennial history of the Columbia Spanish Restaurant (University Press of Florida, 2009). Huse teaches and speaks on a variety of topics, and is presently at work on a history of Florida's restaurants and food culture. He works at the USF Tampa Library's Special Collections department as a librarian and oral historian. Huse lives in Tampa, where he cooks and writes, sometimes simultaneously.

Since beginning his career at CNN in New York, Shawn Bean has become an award-winning author and nationally recognized magazine writer. Twice named Writer of the Year by the Florida Magazine Association, he serves as senior editor of Florida Travel + Life. He is also a judge for the Florida Book Awards, and a recent addition to the Florida Humanities Council’s Scholar Directory. His literary debut, The First Hollywood (University Press of Florida), won the 2008 Florida Book Award and was one of UPF’s best-selling titles of the year. Bean is currently executive editor of Babytalk, the parenting magazine with a readership of 5 million, and authors the monthly fatherhood column ‘Pop Culture.’ He lives in Melbourne, Florida, with wife Brandy and two young sons: Jackson, 6, and Tanner, 3.