Cigar City
Cigar City: Tales from a 1980s Creative Ghetto
Tales from a 1980s creative ghetto
Cigar City is a collection of linked short stories about the young artists, writers, poets, musicians and actors who inhabited Tampa’s Ybor City in the 1980s. Drawn by urban authenticity and cheap rents, they created a surreal, chaotic, arts scene set against the backdrop of the empty cigar factories and shotgun shacks of Tampa’s immigrant past. The Ybor scene drew international artists like James Rosenquist and mirrored what was happening in New York’s East Village.
The stories are fictional but they capture the spirit of the district during the 1980s. The collection is illustrated with photos, posters, and graphic images from the era.
Paul Wilborn was an integral part of the Ybor arts scene and a founding member of Ybor’s Artists and Writers Group. He was also a founder of the annual celebration, Guavaween, along with dozens of other arts events.
Cigar City won the 2019 Gold Medal for Fiction in the annual Florida Book Awards
Read Excerpts
Quarter Moon
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Smoke
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The Apprentice
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The Understudy
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Winner of the Gold Medal for Fiction: 2019 Florida Book Awards
Cigar City is available at local bookstores, including Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg and The Oxford Exchange in Tampa. The book can be ordered through Amazon and direct from St. Petersburg Press.