Amy Watkins grew up in the Central Florida scrub, surrounded by armadillos and palmetto brush and a big, loud, oddly religious family, the kind of upbringing that’s produced generations of Southern writers. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Milk & Water and the art editor of Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine. Her poems and essays have appeared in Circe's Lament: An Anthology of Wild Women Poetry, SunStruck Magazine, and Atheists in America. She earned her MFA in poetry from Spalding University, and lives in Winter Park with her husband, daughter, and a big, shaggy dog.
Amy Watkins talks to Campbell McGrath about Florida's penchant for erasing its history, and the monumental task of tackling twentieth-century history in XX, his new book of poetry.