The 2013 season of Winter With the Writers, A Festival of the Literary Arts, spotlights five contemporary writers to represent the encounters between peoples that followed Ponce de Leon’s arrival in Florida 500 years ago — the Native American novelist, story teller, and poet N. Scott Momaday; Karen Russell, whose novel Swamplandia is set in the Florida Everglades; African Puerto Rican novelist Mayra Santos-Febres; Cuban American poet Ricardo Pau-Llosa; and Azar Nafisi whose National Book Award winning memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran, tells of the power of imagination to create the truth of how humans live and freely believe. This festival season adds to the Rollins College tradition of creating a local literary community of international note. Before them, Sinclair Lewis, Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Carl Sandberg, Michael Ondaatje, Maya Angelou, Derek Walcott, Margot Livesey, Billy Collins and scores more writers have shown audiences in Central Florida how, out of the imagination, a stream of story moments or images can collect and then be arranged into narratives or lyric interludes to tell us how we live and who we are.

Winter With the Writers, A Festival of the Literary Arts is sponsored by The Thomas P. Johnson Distinguished Visiting Scholar and Artist Fund, Winter With the Writers Patrons, and the Rollins College Department of English.