About the Author

Hal Steven Shows grew up in and around the beach towns of North Florida. He spent much of the 1970’s living in Florence, Italy, where he worked as a waiter, a salesman of gold and silver, a teacher of English, and a translator. These years gave him the chance to explore Europe from Edinburgh to the Peloponnese. A graduate of the writing programs at Florida State University and Goddard College, he has translated the work of Cavalcanti, Leopardi, Rilke, Ungaretti, Pasolini, Gatto and others, and written extensively on literature and popular culture. Since the early 1980’s he has been writing, performing, and recording music that defies genre but is actually only rock and roll. He lives near Tallahassee, Florida, where he owns and operates Witchingstick Studio.

Mr. Shows is a State of Florida Individual Artist Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. A chapbook of his poems, A Breath for Nothing, appeared from the Anhinga Press in 1977. With the indie-rock band Persian Gulf he released Changing the Weather (1984), Persian Gulf: The Movie (1986), Trailer (1987), and Cave Art Collective (2001). Subsequent solo productions include Birthday Suit (1990), Lifeboat (1995), Whitman’s Sampler (2000), Native Dancer (2003), and Treasure of Love, (2012). With the garage-rock ensemble Kangaroo Court, he has released the single “Grandaddy Yule” (1986), the album Masque, from the plague year 2021, and the EP Holy Cats in 2022. Parasol, a volume of poems, was published in 2007. The Bandshell Project (2015; 2^nd edition 2016) is a collection of essays on music and poetry.