In April, during a graduate nonfiction class at the University of South Florida, you instructed your students to bring a copy of their final essays to class. Towards the end of the session, after we read the drafts of our essays excruciatingly slowly to each other in pairs, you instructed us to slice and dice our work — to cross out words, phrases, and even paragraphs that didn’t move our pieces forward. I bring this up to say that it is clear Women in Tampa Talking About Alligators has been painstakingly edited. It is concise. Its words and the arrangement of them matter. You practice what you preach, which is beyond admirable.
