Minorcan Writers Symposium

This event is co-sponsored by the Minorcan Studies Project with a grant from the St. Augustine Foundation.

Flagler College Associate Professor of English Dr. Darien Andreu will serve as moderator for the symposium. There will be a Q&A session afterward.

Speakers will include Dr. Ann Browning Masters author of Floridanos, Menorcans, Cattle-Whip Crackers: Poetry of St. Augustine, published by Florida Historical Society Press.  She is known as the Menorcan Poet Laureate and can claim her heritage as Minorcan as well as having ties to the First Spanish Period.

Sandie Stratton studied with Dr. Daniel Schafer at the University of North Florida where she helped establish the website Florida History Online. There her article “From the River to the Sea: Upwardly Mobile Minorcans and Florida’s First Beachside Development.”  She also helped prepare for publication Fromajadas and Indigo by former mayor Kenny Beeson, published posthumously.

HISTORY

In 1777 some 600 people of Minorcan, Spanish, Greek, and Italian backgrounds (referred to collectively as “Minorcans”) arrived in St. Augustine, increasing the town’s population by more than 50 percent. They were refugees from a failed agricultural colony established by Alexander Turnbull at New Smyrna, in 1768.