FSPA Chancellors are selected by vote of the FSPA Board. The organization has named ten Chancellors. One of them, Lee Bennett Hopkins, noted childrens’ poet and anthologist and member of the Florida Artists Hall of Fame, passed away in 2019. His estate continues to support FSPA student contests. Other Chancellors include Peter Meinke, Poet Laureate of the State of Florida, Lola Haskins, Carol Frost, Silvia Curbelo, Denise Duhamel, Virgil Suárez, David Kirby, M.B. McLatchey and Sean Sexton. These poets are longtime residents of Florida with distinguished records of contribution to the art of poetry and to poetry education in the state. To date, all have been FSPA-sponsored nominees for the State Poet Laureate post, and are in fact recognized to be among the finest poets in the nation. The FSPA Chancellor position is a lifetime appointment.
Chancellors assist FSPA by way of instruction and reading at FSPA conventions and other events. They also assist in various FSPA programs that teach and promote the art of poetry across the state, and provide valuable input for new FSPA programs.
Silvia Curbelo is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Falling Landscape and The Secret History of Water, both available from Anhinga Press, and two chapbooks. She has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, the Cintas Foundation and the Writer’s Voice, as well as the Jessica Noble Maxwell Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review. Recently, she was awarded a Professional Development Artist Grant from the Tampa/Hillsborough County Arts Council. Her poems have been published widely in literary journals and more than three dozen anthologies and textbooks, including Poems, Poets, Poetry (Bedford/St Martin) and The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (W.W. Norton). She was an editor for Organica Quarterly: A Magazine of Arts and Activism for more than 20 years and, along with Gregory Byrd, co-edited the anthology Glass Bottom Sky: Ten Years of YellowJacket Press. A native of Cuba, Silvia has lived in Tampa, Florida, all her adult life.
Raised in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, poet Denise Duhamel earned a BFA at Emerson College and an MFA at Sarah Lawrence College. Citing Dylan Thomas and Kathleen Spivack as early influences, Duhamel writes both free verse and fixed-form poems that fearlessly combine the political, sexual, and ephemeral. Introducing Duhamel for Smartish Pace, poet Karla Huston observed, “Her poems speak with a wild irreverence. […] Duhamel experiments with form and subject, creating poetry that challenges the reader’s notion of what poetry should be. She presents what poetry could be as she fully engages pop culture, the joys and horrors of it, while maintaining the ability to poke fun at our foibles—and make us think.” In an interview for Pif magazine with Derek Alger, Duhamel stated, “At some point in my development as a writer, I became interested in putting it all in, trusting my leaps, embracing vulnerability in imagery.” Duhamel has published numerous collections of poetry, including Kinky (Orchisis Press, 1997), Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), Two and Two (Pittsburgh, 2005), Ka-Ching! (Pittsburgh, 2009), and Blowout (Pittsburgh, 2013), which was a finalist for a National Books Critics Circle Award. Her most recent volumes are Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021) and Scald (Pittsburgh, 2017). Duhamel has also collaborated with Maureen Seaton on four collections, including CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). With Julie Wade, Duhamel co-authored The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press, 2019). With Maureen Seaton and David Trinidad, she edited Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry(2007). Duhamel served as the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2013. Duhamel’s honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has featured on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and Bill Moyers’s PBS poetry special Fooling with Words. She is a Distinguished University Professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami. She lives in Hollywood.
Carol Frost Carol Frost was born in 1948 in Lowell, Massachusetts. She studied at the Sorbonne and earned degrees from the State University of Oneonta and Syracuse University. She currently teaches poetry and directs Winter with the Writers at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. Frost is the author of numerous collections, including her newest book entitled Alias City (MadHat Press). Its signature poem appeared in the November 2015 issue of Poetry. Frost has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, won several Pushcart Prizes, and has been nominated for many more. She is one of five finalists for the poet laureateship of Florida. As described at PoetryFoundation.org: “Frost’s poems draw on sources from the Book of Genesis to Shakespeare’s The Tempest to the poetry of John Donne; she writes of the human body, and her poems are rich with the acutely imagined objects of the natural world—whether found off the coast of Florida or in a beehive. Honeycomb, which won the Gold Medal in Poetry from the Florida Book Awards, treats the subject of dementia through a sustained metaphor of the beehive. According to Amy Glynn Greacen in New York Quarterly Reviews, “the interweaving of lost and confabulated, confused knowledge is a running theme. In Frost’s deft hands it resonates and echoes through various natural processes and phenomena.” Frost has been praised for her “protean layers of observation,” in the words of a reviewer for the Women’s Review of Books, and for her inventive syntax; an interviewer at Smartish Pace described Frost’s “encyclopedic approach to subject matter.”
Lola Haskins lives in Gainesville, Florida, and Skipton, Yorkshire. Her poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, the London Review of Books, London Magazine, The New York Quarterly, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle and elsewhere, as well as having been broadcast on NPR and BBC Radio. She has published fourteen collections of poems, a poetry advice book and a non-fiction book about fifteen Florida cemeteries. Ms. Haskins has been awarded three book prizes, two NEA fellowships, four Florida Cultural Affairs fellowships, the Emily Dickinson/Writer Magazine award from Poetry Society of America, and several prizes for narrative poetry. She retired from teaching Computer Science at the University of Florida in 2005 and served from then until 2015 on the faculty of Rainier Writers Workshop.
Lee Bennett Hopkins was a distinguished poet, writer, and anthologist whose poetry collections include the highly acclaimed Hand in Hand: An American History Through Poetry, illustrated by Peter Fiore, and My America: A Poetry Atlas of the United States, and America at War, both illustrated by Stephen Alcorn. Mr. Hopkins’s numerous awards include the University of Southern Mississippi Medallion for “lasting contributions to children’s literature” and both the Christopher Award and a Golden Kite Honor for his verse novel Been to Yesterdays: Poems of a Life.
David Kirby teaches at Florida State University. His collection The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems was a finalist for both the National Book Award and Canada’s Griffin Poetry Prize. He is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement of London called “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense” and was named one of Booklist’s Top 10 Black History Non-Fiction Books of 2010. His latest books are a poetry collection, Help Me, Information, and a textbook modestly entitled The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them.
Peter Meinke, recent recipient of Florida Humanities Lifetime Literary Award for Writing, has been both Poet Laureate of St. Petersburg and Poet Laureate of Florida. His latest collection of poems is Tasting Like Gravity (U. of Tampa Press, 2018). His book of essays, To Start With, Feel Fortunate, illustrated by his wife Jeanne, received the 2017 William Meredith Award. Other books include The Expert Witness (2016), a collection of stories, a children’s book in verse, The Elf Poem (2015), and Lucky Bones (2014), his eighth collection in the prestigious Pitt Poetry Series. His work has appeared in The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, and dozens of other magazines. He has published over 20 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Truth and Affection, published by the University of Tampa Press (2013), is a collection of his Poet’s Notebook columns with his wife Jeanne’s drawings, from Tampa Bay’s alternative newspaper, Creative Loafing. His poetry has received numerous awards, including two NEA Fellowships and three prizes from the Poetry Society of America. His book of short fiction, The Piano Tuner, won the 1986 Flannery O’Connor Award. Mr. Meinke directed the Writing Workshop at Eckerd College for many years and has often been writer-in-residence at other colleges and universities, including a Fulbright Professorship at the University of Warsaw in Poland (when it was still under communist control, but with revolution rumbling in the universities). www.petermeinke.com
M.B. McLatchey is a poet and writer living, writing, and teaching in Florida. Author of five books, including the award-winning titles Beginner’s Mind (Regal House Publishing, 2021) and The Lame God (2013 May Swenson Award, Utah State University Press), she is recipient of the American Poet Prize from American Poetry Journal, the Annie Finch Prize from National Poetry Review, and was recently nominated for the 2020 Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. McLatchey is Professor of Humanities at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Poet Laureate of Florida’s Volusia County, Arts Ambassador for Atlantic Center for the Arts, and U.S. Ambassador to the HundrED global foundation for education. She received her graduate degree in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, Master of Arts in Teaching from Brown University, MFA in Poetry from Goddard College, and her B.A. from Williams College. Visit her at www.mbmclatchey.com
Sean Sexton was born in Indian River County and grew up on his family’s Treasure Hammock Ranch. He divides his time between managing a 700-acre cow-calf and seed stock operation, painting, and writing. He has kept daily sketch and writing journals since 1973. He is author three full volumes of poems including Blood Writing, Anhinga Press, 2009, May Darkness Restore, Press 53, 2019, and Portals, Press 53, 2023. He has performed at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, NV, Miami Book Fair International, Other Words Literary Conference in Tampa, FL and the High Road Poetry and Short Fiction Festival, in Winston-Salem, NC. He has garnered several nominations for Pushcart Prizes, and received a Florida Individual Artist’s Fellowship in 2001. Sean is a board member of the Laura Riding Jackson Foundation (LRJF.org) and founding event chair of its Annual Poetry and Barbeque held each April, now in its twelfth year. He also co-founded Advent and Lenten Poetry and Organ Concert Series at The Community Church of Vero Beach, (ccovb.org) featuring nine concerts annually, attracting poets from all over the US. He became inaugural Poet Laureate of Indian River County in 2016.
Virgil Suárez was born in Havana, Cuba in 1962. At the age of twelve he arrived in the United States. He received an MFA from Louisiana State University in 1987 and is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently 90 Miles: Selected And New, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. His work has appeared in a multitude of magazines and journals internationally. He has been taking photographs on the road for the last three decades. When he is not writing, he is out riding his motorcycle up and down the Blue Highways of the Southeast, photographing disappearing urban and rural landscapes. His 10th volume of poetry, The Painted Bunting’s Last Molt, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2021.