By:
Chuck Woods (352) 392-1773 x 281Source:
Don Poucher info@ifas.ufl.edu, 352-392-0437
GAINESVILLE, Fla.—Patrick Davis Smith, a widely published author who was named the Greatest Living Floridian by the Florida Historical Society in 2002 and inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame in 1999, will be the featured speaker March 18 in the 2004 York Distinguished Lecturer Series at the University of Florida.
Smith, whose topic will be “Florida – A Land Remembered,” will speak at 7 p.m. during the annual Gamma Sigma Delta banquet at the Reitz Union. The presentation, which is the 18th in the York lecturer series, is free and open to the public. Smith will be available to sign his book with the same title on March 18 at 3 p.m. at the UF Hilton Hotel and Conference Center.
A native of Mississippi, Smith holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in English from the University of Mississippi. He moved to Florida in 1966, but his ties to Florida go back much longer than that.
The Florida Historical Society’s Fay Schweim Award as the Greatest Living Floridian is a one-time-only award established to honor the individual who has contributed the most to Florida in recent history. Smith was cited for the impact his novels have made on Floridians and for the worldwide acclaim he has received. The Florida Artists Hall of Fame is the highest and most prestigious cultural honor that can be bestowed upon an individual by the State of Florida.
Smith is the author of seven novels: The River Is Home, The Beginning, Forever Island, Angel City, Allapattah, A Land Remembered and The Seas That Mourn. He is also co-author of the non-fiction book The Last Ride and author of the non-fiction book In Search of the Russian Bear, which is set in Russia and in Uzbekistan in middle Asia.
He has been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for Forever Island, which was a 1974 selection of the Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Club and has been published in 46 countries; in 1978 for Angel City, which was produced as a movie for the CBS television network and aired worldwide; and in 1984 for A Land Remembered, which was an editors’ choice selection in the New York Times Book Review. In a 2002 statewide poll taken by Florida Monthly magazine, A Land Remembered was ranked as the best Florida book. The novel also ranked first in the 2001 poll.
Smith’s lifetime work was nominated for the 1985 Nobel Prize for Literature, and since then he has received five additional nominations.
Previous honors include: the Tebeau Prize for A Land Remembered as the most outstanding Florida historical novel, Florida Historical Society, 1986; Outstanding Author Award, Council for Florida Libraries, 1986; Outstanding Florida Author Award, Space Coast Writer’s Guild, 1987; Communications Achievement Award, Toastmasters International, 1987; Environmental Writer’s Award, Florida Audubon Society, 1987; Florida Today Best Writer Award, 1987, 1990 and 1992; Medal of Honor, National Society of Daughters of the American Revolution (highest national award), 1988; Order of the South Award, Southern Academy of Letters, Arts and Sciences (highest literary award), 1996; Florida Ambassador of the Arts Award, Florida Department of State, 1996; the first Florida Cracker Heritage Award, presented for outstanding contributions to Florida pioneer heritage, Florida Cracker Trail Association, 1997; Lifetime Achievement Award, Lee County Reading Festival, Fort Myers, 2001.
In 1990, the Florida Public Broadcasting Service released a television documentary, Visions of Nature Patrick Smith’s Florida, which portrays his work as a writer and the extensive on-site research he has done for his novels. In October 1990, he received the University of Mississippi’s Distinguished Alumni Award and was inducted into the university’s Alumni Hall of Fame. In 1997, the Florida Historical Society created the annual Patrick D. Smith Florida Literature Award in his honor.
In 1983 and 1986, Smith made lecture tours in Russia and middle Asia, and in 1986 he was the keynote speaker for a 57-nation International Writers Meeting held in Sofia, Bulgaria. Smith, who has also written numerous short stories, essays and articles, resides with his wife Iris on Merritt Island, Fla.
The York Distinguished Lecturer Series was established in 1984 through an endowment from E.T. York and his wife, Vam. As provost of agriculture and vice president for agriculture and natural resources at UF from 1963 to 1973, he brought together the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, the Florida Cooperative Extension Service and the Florida Agricultural Experiment Station under the single administrative umbrella of the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS).
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