On Nov. 1, 1987, at 30 years old, I left my home and family in Haiti to search for a better life. The economic and political situation was unbearable, and my family was being abused by the Duvalier regime. I promised my parents I would come back for them. On that day, I boarded a […]

I always wrote poetry but there was nowhere here in Miami where I could share my poems. You would go crazy looking for a group or something. Nothing. Cultural? Back then in the ’90s? No. So one day I heard about this book fair. There was a group that came from Palm Beach. It would […]

Because of my older sister Gilda’s illness, my parents, Hedwig and Benjamin Goldstein, were advised in 1942 to move from the Bronx to Miami Beach, where we lived at the La Flora Hotel on Collins Avenue. Every hotel was filled with Army recruits, who marched on Collins Avenue holding their faux rifles, which were actually […]

I was born in the city of San Pedro, California. Our family is very large and of Mexican descent. I was the youngest of four children. We grew up in a Catholic parochial school. Then I chose to further my education. I was the only one in my family who went to college. And I […]

When people ask me if I love a person romantically, I kind of laugh. I laugh because I’m sort of having an affair. I love my Venezuelan wife, whom I met in Miami. But, truth be told, I am already in love with something else — the city of Miami. My love has drawbacks. She’s […]

Although my mother, the former Edith Leibowitz, was born in New York, she graduated from Miami Beach High in 1942. So it was only natural that she and my father, Marvin Kuperman, would move to Miami following their marriage in 1946. I was born in Victoria Hospital (which no longer exists) in 1948. We lived […]

I wanted to spend my retirement entertained with a million things to do each and every day. My husband Steve, on the other hand, wanted to spend his retired life in the sun, fishing for permit. He said, “Key West.” I said, “New York.” I was determined to remain in New York, and Steve was […]

My sojourn to South Florida started before I moved here in 1957. My sister and brother-in-law were here from New York on a winter vacation on December 26, 1947. The metropolitan area of New York had a snowstorm of 26 inches in a 24-hour period. It was a record then and may still be to […]

In 1951, I was young and it was the summer of my junior year in high school. I left St. Louis to join my older brother, a waiter at Martha Raye’s nightclub. It seemed to me to be an interesting life and he had agreed, after some pleading, to let me join him – as […]