Neil de la Flor
NEIL DE LA FLOR is a writer, educator, artist, and executive director of Reading Queer, a Miami-based organization dedicated to promoting and fostering queer literary culture in South Florida. His first book, Almost Dorothy, won the 2009 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and was published in 2010. Marsh Hawk also published his second collection, An Elephant’s Memory of Blizzards in 2013.
Of Sinéad O’Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds, his premier collaboration with Maureen Seaton, Sarah Burghauser writes in the Lambda Literary Review: “Lusty, swanky, and well-toned, these poems are playful without being light, and smart without being esoteric. Read this book to witness an inspiring dexterity with language. Read this book for a loving sucker-punch to the brain. Read this book in a place where it is okay to lol, or even to loofah.”
For more information, visit Neil de la Flor’s website or follow him on : X @neil_delaflor.
Maureen Seaton (October 20, 1947 – August 26, 2023) authored numerous poetry collections, both solo and collaborative. Her awards included the Iowa Poetry Prize and the Lambda Literary Award for Furious Cooking, the Audre Lorde Award for Venus Examines Her Breast, an NEA, and two Pushcarts. Her memoir, Sex Talks to Girls, also garnered a “Lammy.” Seaton taught creative writing at the University of Miami, Florida, where she first met Neil de la Flor and collaborated with him on Sinéad O’Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds (Firewheel Editions, 2011, winner of the Sentence Book Award) and with Neil and Kristine Snodgrass on Two Thieves and a Liar (Jackleg Press, 2012). A solo collection, Fisher, debuted from Black Lawrence Press in 2018. In 2018, she and Neil de la Flor coedited Reading Queer (Anhinga Press)/
De la Flor constructs an introspective and linguistically intricate backdrop upon which he and Maureen Seaton engage in a genre-defying conversation of original meta-analytic philosophies: The Boat with a Girls’ Heart as collage, the act of keeping Maureen alive on the page, freedom, cyclones, softballs, two queens standing on the tip of a glow stick — this collection becomes both elegy and celebration, a layered palimpsest of queer friendship and poetic wisdom. — Clayre Benzadón, author of Moon as Salted Lemon