There was no indication, early on, that Tom Healy would become a poet. Growing up on a farm in upstate New York, in an environment he describes as “brutalizing in every aspect,” Healy didn’t get much intellectual encouragement. Mostly, he spent his time doing the hard work required on a…

Bikers are rugged individuals, but they also like to travel in packs, especially packs that meet where hot wings and beautiful girls are in abundance. And that’s the case every Tuesday night at Hooters Doral for Motoport Bike Night. In case you didn’t know, Motoport is a great small-engine store…

Bored with fall’s slasher films and winter’s Christmas-themed snoozer’s? Bite into some celluloid with a little more substance. Nokomis: Voices of the Anishinabe Grandmothers documents Ojibwe women’s attempts to restore and preserve their Native American culture and heritage. They recall painful memories of growing up trying to conform to a…

Second Saturday is back again, and this month we’re highlighting some happenings on the north side of I-195. As the Design District has added top-notch gallery spaces such as Bas Fisher, Spinello, and Locust Projects, Art + Design Night has become a must-stop for art lovers. For drunks and foodies…

Do not be alarmed by the cloud of smoke you see moving slowly toward the Miami Improv at the Shoppes of Mayfair; that’s just the tour bus of one Pauly Shore, aka The Weasel, who’s doing something that may or may not resemble stand-up comedy this Saturday night. Your early…

There’s something drunken about the word “klezmer,” maybe because much of the music it stands for developed at weddings where, inevitably, the dancing crowd consumed a little too much wine; the young felt, perhaps, a little too much joy; and the elderly felt, perhaps, a little too much sorrow. Those…

Composer Pierre Boulez once said that the solution to the declining audience for opera was to blow up the opera houses, the kind of overly dramatic line that, quite frankly, belongs in an opera. If drama’s your thing, you can’t do better than the original pairing of one-act operas showing…

Historians have already begun comparing the 1990s with the 1920s; both share exorbitant wealth, optimism, and blindness to the coming recession. But take one look at Vizcaya, Miami’s architectural gem from the early ’20s, and you realize the 1990s fell well short in the opulence category. James Deering spent eight…

For fellow writers, Jonathan Lethem needs no introduction. 1999’s Motherless Brooklyn, the story of a detective with Tourette’s syndrome, put Lethem on the map, but by that point, he’d already written four novels that breached the genre line between science fiction and literary fiction, a line that, thanks in large…

Seventeen syllables for five hundred dollars is a pretty good deal right?That’s what my friends over at Knight Arts are offering right now to the Miami-Dade resident who can write the best haiku on the subject of the recent public arts funding budget hearings. Just go to their website and…

Leading up to Miami Book Fair International, Riptide 2.0 will be publishing profiles of visiting authors. Check back often as two to three will going up per day until Sunday, November 15.Marie Ponsot is the best poet you’ve never heard of.Her first book, True Minds, was published in 1957 by…

Not many records released this year will have as much good karma on their side as Lost & Found, the new album by Miami nonprofit Voices United.Voices United was founded in 1989 by then 17-year-old director Katie Christie. It brings together 150 local children a year together to write and…

Brave the 85-degree weather and venture out to Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus this week for one of the greatest author combinations Evenings With… schedules the Miami Book Fair has ever assembled. Sunday is poet Elizabeth Alexander and novelist Margaret Atwood at 5 and 7 p.m., respectively. Monday is food…

Do people even know this Wednesday is Veteran’s Day? Or the reason why it’s celebrated November 11? For the historically or Google-impaired, it’s the day in 1918 when the Germans signed the armistice treaty, ending World War I. Back in the day, every town in America had a huge parade…

Not many films can boast what The Wind and the Water can: that it’s the first documentary ever made by an indigenous Panamanian tribe. The Kuna people own and live on a collection of 365 islands off the coast of Panama City, which, as you can imagine, is some of…

The Paris-born Sleepless Night seems tailor-made for a town like Miami Beach, where hotel rooms are just a secure place to store your bags. This Saturday, the all-night celebration is back with 150 free cultural events from Mid Beach down to the Pointe. Trying to hit them all is futile,…

American Halloween is weak sauce: Dress up like Michael Jackson, pay too much to get into a cheesy club where every single girl is wearing a hooker costume, and then drive home drunk. No, thanks. Fet Gede, on the other hand, is pure tequila. The name translates to “Festival for…

In a boon for intellectual life in Miami, the University of Miami unveils its brand-new Center for the Humanities–the first of its kind in South Florida–this evening at 6 p.m. in the Storer Auditorium in the School of Business Administration (5250 University Drive, Coral Gables).What is a Center for the…