Craig Pittman is an American journalist and an author of books mostly about Florida. He was a reporter and columnist for the ''
Tampa Bay Times
The ''Tampa Bay Times'', previously named the ''St. Petersburg Times'' until 2011, is an American newspaper published in St. Petersburg, Florida, United States. It has won fourteen Pulitzer Prizes since 1964, and in 2009, won two in a single y ...
'' for thirty-one years before becoming a weekly columnist for the ''
Florida Phoenix''. He is co-host of the podcast entitled, ''Welcome to Florida'',
and issues a weekly newsletter entitled, ''Oh Florida!, the Newsletter''. An award winning series of articles he co-authored was published as, ''Paving Paradise''. In 2020, the Florida Heritage Book Festival honored Pittman as a "Living Legend".
[https://www.tampabay.com/arts-entertainment/arts/books/2019/10/11/craig-pittman-becomes-a-florida-literary-legend/%3FoutputType%3Damp]
Books
*''Paving Paradise: Florida's Vanishing Wetlands and the Failure of No Net Loss'' (2009) (co-authored with Matthew Waite)
*''Manatee Insanity: Inside the War Over Florida's Most Famous Endangered Species'' (2010)
*''The Scent of Scandal: Greed, Betrayal, and the World's Most Beautiful Orchid'' (2012)
*''Oh, Florida! How America's Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country'' (2016)
*''Cat Tale: The Wild, Weird Battle to Save the Florida Panther '' (2020)
*''The State You're In: Florida Men, Florida Women, and Other Wildlife'' (2021)
''The Scent of Scandal''
This nonfiction book, which focuses on a Florida court case involving charges of orchid smuggling, is the only book ever classified as "True Crime/Gardening".
''Oh, Florida!''
According to ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'', Pittman's 2016 book entitled, ''Oh, Florida! How America's Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country'', is a "compulsively readable", native son's view of the state he "obviously loves", in which he makes a persuasive case that Florida has an outsize influence on the national culture.
The book grew out of a series of articles Pittman wrote for the magazine, ''
Slate
Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade regional metamorphism. It is the finest grained foliated metamorphic rock. ...
''.
The book, which covers such topics as driving in Florida, gambling in Florida, and sin and salvation in Florida, contains one of the earliest published uses of the phrase "Drainpipe of America". It became a ''New York Times'' bestseller. In February 2017, it won the
Florida Book Award
The Florida Book Awards are a set of annual statewide literary awards that recognize Floridian authors and books about Florida published in the previous year. Established in 2006, the awards are administered by the Florida State University Librarie ...
gold medal for Florida nonfiction.
''Cat Tale''
Documents the decades-long rediscovery of the
Florida panther
The Florida panther is a North American cougar (''P. c. couguar'') population in South Florida. It lives in pinelands, tropical hardwood hammocks, and mixed freshwater swamp forests. It is known under a number of common names including Costa R ...
, its election to state animal, and conservationist attempts to protect it from inbreeding, pollution, hunting, loss of food, and habitat loss. It describes a controversy when the leading panther expert, Dr. David Maehr, covertly took money from wealthy donors and then wrote faulty science papers that would give developers the green light to "pave" over natural swamps and forests needed for panther habitat.
References
External links
WFME author interviewWLRN author interview
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pittman, Craig
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
American male journalists