Photo by Errol Nicholson
Tyler Gillespie
Artist in Residence
March 2025
Tyler Gillespie is the author of the nonfiction collection The Thing about Florida: Exploring a Misunderstood State (University Press of Florida, 2021) and two poetry collections — the nature machine! (Autofocus, 2023) and Florida Man: Poems, Revisited (Burrow Press, 2024).
A former journalist, his reporting appears in Rolling Stone, The Guardian, GQ, VICE, The Daily Beast, Playboy, and other outlets. He’s the co-editor of The Awkward Phase (Skyhorse, 2016), and his humor writing can be found in the New Yorker, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and LGBTQ Comedic Monologues That Are Actually Funny. Gillespie is a fifth-generation Floridian and wrote the introduction for A24’s Florida! A Hyper-Local Guide to the Flora, Fauna, and Fantasy of the Most Far-out State in America.
He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans and a PhD in English: Writing, Rhetoric, & Technical Communication from the University of Memphis. In 2021, he won The X. A. Kramer, Jr. Outstanding Teaching Award at the University of Mississippi. He’s currently a Professor and Writing Program Coordinator at Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, FL.
Books Chosen for the Lab Library by
Tyler Gillespie
One Big Self: An Investigation
by
C.D. Wright
Madness, Rack, and Honey
Collected Lectures by Mary Rueflé
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
by Stephen King
A Poetry Handbook
by Mary Oliver
Writing Tools
by Roy Peter Clark
We Can’t Help It If We’re From Florida
Edited by Shane Hinton
Bird by Bird
Anne Lamott
Florida Man: Poems, Revisited
by Tyler Gillespie