South Florida Writers at the 43rd Miami Book Fair

The 43rd Miami Book Fair runs November 15–22 at Miami Dade College's Wolfson Campus, with the Street Fair weekend November 20–22. Every year the Fair brings a roster that spans the literary world. This year it also brings an unusually strong concentration of writers who are from here, live here, or have built their work around this place. Here are the South Florida voices worth knowing before you go.

Chantel Acevedo was born in Miami to Cuban exile parents and has spent most of her life in this city. She is a professor of creative writing at Florida International University, where she has shaped a generation of South Florida writers. Her novels — A Falling Star, The Distant Marvels, The Living Infinite, and Song of the Red Cloak — draw on Cuban history, exile memory, and the particular texture of a life lived between two worlds. The Distant Marvels, set during the 1926 Cuban hurricane, was a finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Her work is rooted in the idea that the stories of Cuban women — and by extension, Miami women — deserve the full weight of literary attention. She is one of the most important writers working in South Florida, and one of the least celebrated outside it.

Elena Armas was born in Spain and has made Miami her home. She broke through with The Spanish Love Deception (2021), a romance that became a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller and introduced a readership of millions to a Miami-based Spanish engineer navigating love and identity in a city that felt like hers. Her follow-up, The American Roommate Experiment, deepened that world. Her new book, Alma Vampires, is the first installment of the Icarus University gothic series — a departure in genre, but not in voice. On November 19 at MDC Wolfson Campus, Armas appears in conversation with Meg Cabot in what is one of the more anticipated pairings of the Fair: two Florida women, two massive readerships, one stage.

Ruth Behar was born in Havana, grew up in Miami, and has spent her career as a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan — but Miami and Cuba have never left her work. She is the author of The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart, a landmark text in the field, and the memoir An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba. Her young adult novel Lucky Broken Girl, based on her own childhood in Miami after the family's immigration from Cuba, won the Pura Belpré Award and introduced her to a new generation of readers. Her most recent novel, Letters from Cuba, follows a young Jewish girl who escapes Nazi Europe for Havana in 1938. Behar is the rare writer who holds the Cuba-Miami connection with both scholarly rigor and personal tenderness — a bridge between the island and the city that received it.

Meg Cabot has lived in Key West for years, and Florida has seeped into her work in ways both obvious and quiet. She is the author of more than 50 books, most famously The Princess Diaries series, which became a global franchise and introduced an entire generation to the idea that an ordinary girl from New York could discover she was royalty — and still have to deal with her grandmother. Her adult novels, including the Heather Wells mystery series and Queen of Babble, have the same wit and warmth. On November 19, she joins Elena Armas in conversation around Alma Vampires — two writers who understand that romance and genre fiction are not lesser forms, and that their readers deserve to be taken seriously.

Amaris Castillo is a South Florida journalist and the author of Goldie, a debut novel about a Dominican-American girl growing up in Florida navigating family, identity, and the particular loneliness of being between cultures. Castillo has spent her career covering South Florida communities — the people who make this place what it is but rarely see themselves in the literary canon. Goldie is a book for young readers, but it carries the weight of a writer who has spent years listening carefully to the stories that don't always get told.

Manny Diaz served as Mayor of Miami from 2001 to 2009, a period that reshaped the city's downtown, waterfront, and identity. His book Miami Transformed is part memoir, part urban policy argument — a case for what Miami became and what it still could be. On November 16, he joins urban designer Victor Dover and architect Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk for a panel on transit, Transit-Oriented Development, and the future of South Florida. It is the kind of conversation that matters more in Miami than almost anywhere else: a city that has grown faster than its infrastructure, grappling with what comes next.

Judy Blume has lived in Key West for more than 30 years. She owns Books & Books at The Studios of Key West, which she opened with Mitchell Kaplan in 2016, and she has been a fixture of South Florida's literary life for decades. She is, of course, one of the most important American writers of the 20th century — Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, Blubber, Forever, Tiger Eyes — books that told young readers the truth about their lives at a time when most books for children did not. On November 20, the Miami Book Fair's Fourth Annual Next Page Dinner honors Blume at the JW Marriott Marquis Miami. The evening includes a tribute to Margaret Atwood presented by The Women's Fund, dining with authors at every table, a cocktail reception, and a silent auction. Attire is Miami Chic. Tickets at miamibookfair.com/nextpage.

The Fair's full indoor programming runs November 15–19 at MDC Wolfson Campus, with the Street Fair free and open to the public November 20–22 across downtown Miami. Other highlights include Colson Whitehead on November 19 presenting Cool Machine, the final novel in his Harlem Trilogy; Brad Meltzer and Brad Thor on November 18; and David Grutman on November 17 with Take It Personal. The Street Fair is one of the great free public events in Miami — three days of books, food, and music across the MDC campus and surrounding streets, no ticket required to walk in.