MUSE will celebrate artistic inspiration on Friday, February 8, 2019  at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg at 7:00 p.m.  The sixth annual benefit for the arts will recognize the breadth and beauty of art and culture in our City of the Arts, and pay tribute to those that continue to inspire and guide St. Petersburg to its standing as an international arts destination.  Proceeds will benefit artists, arts education, and arts & cultural organizations through our Arts Alliance programs and services.

Sterling Watson has published seven novels including Suitcase city, Fighting in the Shade, Sweet Dream Baby, Deadly Sweet, Blind Tongues, The Calling and Weep No More, My Brother.  His eight novel, The Committee, will be published by Akashic Books in January 2020.  He is the recipient of three Florida Fine Arts Council Awards for Fiction Writing.  His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such publications as Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Southern Review. He has received fellowships for residencies from the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.  He served for five years as Chair of the Creative Art Collegium at Eckerd College and retired from thirty-four years of teaching as an endowed chair, The Peter Meinke Professor of Literature and Creative Writing.  For eleven years he co-directed with Dennis Lehane the Writers in Paradise Conference held each January.  He is recipient of the John M. Bevan Teaching Excellence and Campus Leadership Award and the Lloyd W. Chapin Award for Excellence isn Scholarship and the Arts.  Before Eckerd, he taught at the University of Florida and in the Prison School of the Florida State Penitentiary.

FOR MORE INFORMATION and TO PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

Each sponsorship purchased at the Cabaret level and above will receive a copy of Edel Mohr’s book “Murals of the Sunshine City.”