Black Dog is excited to welcome two traveling authors for this week's literary night, our weekly event to celebrate our love of the written word.

Laura McDermott is the founder and executive director of Orange Island Arts Foundation, a literary arts organization. McDermott studied creative writing at Florida State University, received her M.F.A. in poetry from Florida International University, and is a tenured assistant professor of English at Broward College. She was the recipient of the 2014 Wells Fargo Endowed Teaching Chair. As a member of the Miami Poetry Collective, McDermott’s poems are regularly featured in its Cent Journal Series: A Modern Anthology of Miami Poets. Her poems have also appeared in Screw Iowa! the Virginia Key website, The Selected Collective: Volume VII of Tigertail, and Poets & Artists. She is the 2014-2015 Writer-in-Residence of Girls’ Club, Ft. Lauderdale.

Lourdes R. Florido was born in Havana, Cuba, and experienced a multicultural upbringing in Kansas City, Missouri and Miami, Florida. A lover of 18th and 19th century period art and literature, she especially enjoys classic romances and tales that involve maritime adventures.

A former print journalist, Florido is now an English Professor at Broward College. She has had articles published in a number of newspapers and magazines, and her 2006 Young Adult novel, White Trees received an Honorable Mention in the Independent Publisher Awards. She received a First Place Award of Merit from the Writer's Network of South Florido for her non-fiction piece, "The Cuban Me". She is currently working on a Key West historical romance and envisioning more adventures for Nicolas and Henry her main characters in a Whisper of Angels.