11/20/2016
it has been a busy month! Five members attended the FSPA convention in October, on Daytona Beach. There wasn't a lot of time to walk on the sand-- we had a very full agenda. There was a chancellors dinner with our newly-crowned honorary chancellor, Lola Haskins, one of the top candidates for Florida Poet Laureate, many interesting workshops, and still time for fun with a game of Poets Jeopardy. During Janet Watson's presentation on "How to Approach Poetry Contests, our own John Foster took on the persona of "Judge Johnny", a poetry contest judge of an unusual kind, complete with a court wig made of paper (rejected poems). We were thankful that our members' poems did not find themselves tangled in there---NRP actually did very well in this year's FSPA contests,winning many awards.
We will not be having meetings in November or December but are celebrating a successful year in poetry with a holiday gathering at the Richland Schoolhouse home of Meg Roman. We look forward to 2017 and our first meeting of the year in January. We'll have much to talk about since NRP will be co-hosting (with Sunshine Poets) the FSPA Spring Fling in April, which will be held at the Clarion Hotel and Conference Center in Tampa.
We wish everyone a lovely holiday season.