“There is recognition of a crying need for a place to cultivate the study of Florida,” co-founder and former director of the Florida Studies Program, Gary Mormino, said in a 2003 press release that coincided with the start of the Florida Studies Program at USF.
Photo by María José Solís | The Crow’s Nest
By Julia Birdsall
Students and community members were able to interact with award winning authors and public figures on April 11 at the University of South St. Petersburg’s Florida Studies Program’s second book festival. The event featured literature and speakers who are rooted in Florida’s culture and history.
The festival took place inside of Lynn Pippenger Hall (LPH), utilizing the lobby space to sell literature and the first-floor auditorium space for speakers.
The Florida Studies program, which has existed at the University of South Florida since 2002, hosted the book festival for the first time in 2025.
Florida Studies program director and USF St. Petersburg geography professor Chris Meindl told The Crow’s Nest last year that he would like to see the festival become an annual event.
His dream came true with this year’s event featuring notable speakers like former Senator and NASA administrator Bill Nelson, award-winning author and USF alum Jody Noll and Kerry Kriseman, author and spouse of Rick Kriseman — the former mayor of St. Petersburg from 2014 to 2022.
Each of them discussed different aspects of Florida’s life and history.
Nelson’s book “Mission: An American Congressman’s Voyage to Space,” which details his experience aboard the space shuttle Columbia, has been updated with a new premise and republished.
To promote the book, Nelson spoke about the history of space exploration in Florida, as well as his own experience being both a temporary astronaut and the administrator of NASA.
He connected his own time in space to the new Artemis era of NASA — which most recently launched the Artemis II mission — and excited the crowd with his description of how NASA brings communities and governments together and could continue to discover new aspects of space in the coming years.
Additionally, he discussed war and the militarization of space.
“The next war will be fought in space,” he said, a prospect that he feels is inevitable and influenced by current state and national politics.
While Nelson stated that he is an eternal optimist, that optimism has been tested in the last year.
“I am worried about civic understanding of our institutions, which come from our Constitution,” he said. “And when our people don’t understand that they are susceptible to all kinds of dalliances…if certain norms are not understood by the populace, namely that we operate as a rule of law, then it shakes our very foundations.”
Kerry Kriseman was the next speaker, following a short lunch break, and she delved into politics on a much smaller scale: the local and the personal.
She was interviewed by Sam Henderson — former Gulfport city council member and mayor of Gulfport — about her 2021 book, “Accidental First Lady: On the Front Lines (and Behind the Scenes) of Local Politics.”
She spoke about how she and her family became very visible figures throughout the duration of her husband’s 22-year political campaign, which sometimes led to uncomfortable amounts of scrutiny from the public.
As time passed, a lot of this scrutiny came from the internet and social media. Kriseman said that as these platforms became more entrenched in partisan bias, the impact reached even local politics, which was difficult to navigate and led to some unfortunate incidents for her family that are detailed throughout the memoir.
Both she and Henderson agreed that one of the hardest parts of being closely tied to someone in politics is seeing them be disparaged by strangers on the internet.
Now, being four years removed from her husband’s last political venture, Kriseman stated that while her family is unlikely to return to local politics, there are still ways that they feel called to help their community.
Kriseman has been involved in several activism campaigns, such as one for sensible gun-control policies and ovarian cancer awareness, and community initiatives, such as Dogs Incorporated, that she feels can make a difference in the Tampa Bay area.
Jody Noll touched on community activism as well in his talk about his book, “The 1968 Florida Teachers’ Strike: Public Sector Unionism and the Fight Against Sunshine State Conservatism.”
Noll’s research on this topic began as an honors thesis when he was an undergraduate student in a class taught by co-founder and former director of the Florida Studies Program, Gary Mormino. It evolved into his master’s thesis and a dissertation before becoming a book.
The Florida teachers’ strike, which was the beginning of a lot of union activism in Florida, mirrors some of the conditions that are present in Florida’s current education system — such as pay cuts for teachers and reduced funding for certain schools.
While many sources would call the strike a failure, Noll sees the many successes that resulted from it.
School systems gained $68 million in revenue and Florida legislature added a clause to the state constitution to grant public sector employees the ability to collectively bargain.
Noll pointed out that, while many of the state laws that are in place to protect employees are under attack from government officials like Gov. Ron DeSantis, collective activism can still yield positive change.
“Coming together, organizing, camaraderie really, really works, and is a really powerful tool,” he said to the crowd. “Now, it’s illegal for me to tell people to go on strike, and that’s not a decision I could ever make, but I do think, you know, this kind of collective action and mass mobilization is an incredibly effective tool.”
Much like the Florida Studies Program’s aim, the festival generated hope for the future using lessons from the past.
This story has been updated to clarify that Kerry Kriseman is an ovarian cancer advocate, not a breast cancer advocate.
