Klinkenberg, Jeff 1949-

views updated

KLINKENBERG, Jeff 1949-

PERSONAL:

Born 1949; married. Education: Graduated from the University of Florida. Hobbies and other interests: Cycling, hiking, swimming, canoeing, running, and fly fishing.

ADDRESSES:

Home—St. Petersburg, FL. Office—St. Petersburg Times, 490 First Ave. S, St. Petersburg, FL 33701. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Journalist, author, musician, educator, and columnist. University of Florida, adjunct instructor, College of Journalism. Member of band, The Fabulous Nosecaps.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Pulitzer Prize nomination (six times); Paul Hansell Distinguished Journalism Award, Florida Society of Newspaper Editors, for best body of work (awarded twice); Meeman Writing Contest, Scripps-Howard, environmental journalism finalist (twice); Ernie Pyle Human Interest writing finalist.

WRITINGS:

Real Florida: Key Lime Pies, Worm Fiddlers, A Man Called Frog, and Other Endangered Species, Down Home Press (Asheboro, NC), 1993.

Dispatches from the Land of Flowers: A Snake Man, A Sad Poet, A Lightning Stalker, and Other Stories about Real Florida, Down Home Press (Asheboro, NC), 1996.

Seasons of Real Florida, foreword by Randy Wayne White, University Press of Florida (Gainesville, FL), 2004.

Author of regular column, "Real Florida," in St. Petersburg Times.

Contributor to periodicals such as Audubon, Travel and Leisure, National Wildlife, and Outside.

SIDELIGHTS:

St. Petersburg Times columnist Jeff Klinkenberg keeps his journalistic eye trained on Florida locations far from the tourist mainstream—and sometimes, far from the world of most Florida residents. He looks to local and regional personalities, institutions, businesses, artists and writers, and other people and places to uncover the many facets of art, culture, and business that make up Florida. For Klinkenberg, "the Sunshine State's essence lies in its hidden swamps, forests, rivers, and caves and in the forgotten characters and creatures that inhabit them," observed a Publishers Weekly contributor in a review of Seasons of Real Florida.

In Seasons of Real Florida, Klinkenberg presents a collection of St. Petersburg Times columns, rearranged and revised to focus on the unique aspects of each of the four seasons in Florida. He reports on the most salient representations of each season, including the stone crabs of fall, the orange blossoms of winter, the alligators of spring, and the searing heat of summer. He writes about an artist who also happens to be a prison inmate; a naturalist and bear conservationist; a notorious haunted house; the life and times of an Ybor City fishmonger; an octogenarian collector of shells; and other individuals and places that together form the vast cultural, economic, and environmental mosaic of Florida. Each of Klinkenberg's pieces in the book convey "the authentic character of the state while adding to the more familiar legends about Florida," remarked Allison Barnes in Southern Living. Library Journal reviewer Herbert E. Shapiro noted that "what all these pieces of local color share is the author's love of his home state."