An Evening with Diane Roberts

Part family memoir, part political commentary, part apologia, Dream State tells the grand and sometimes crazy story of Florida through the eyes of one of its native daughters.

Acclaimed journalist and NPR commentator Diane Roberts has many family secrets to tell. Roberts’s ancestors helped settle Florida, K*ll off its pesky Indians, enslave some of its inhabitants, clear its forests, lay its train tracks, and pave its roads, all the time weaving themselves into the very fabric of the state.
With a storyteller’s talent for setting great scenes, Roberts lays out the sweeping history of eight generations of Browards and Bradfords, Tuckers and Robertses. From Florida’s first inhabitants to those involved in the recent past with the botched presidential election of 2000, Roberts renders them all with a deep, familial affection. While exposing the real people whom Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard have been fictionalizing for years, Dream State ultimately reveals the cogs and wheels that make the state tick.

Diane Roberts is an eighth-generation Floridian, educated at Florida State University and Oxford University where she earned a D.Phil. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Guardian, and The Tampa Bay Times. She is a long-time essayist for National Public Radio, a commentator for the BBC, and a Contributing Editor at the Oxford American magazine, as well as a political columnist for the Florida Phoenix. Her essays have been included in Best American Essays and Best American Food Writing. She is the author of several scholarly books as well as literary nonfiction including Dream State, an historical memoir of Florida, and Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America. She is currently working on a book about her upbringing in the white lady industrial complex and how the United States continues to be haunted by race. Roberts is the University Alumni Distinguished Writer and a Professor of English at Florida State University. She lives in Tallahassee, but flees to England periodically for a break from the urbanization of her home state.

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