‘Whispers from the Bay’ wins award

Florida State University and the Florida Book Awards committee recently announced that Delray Beach author, John Tkac, has won the Gold Medal in the Young Adult Literature category for his novel, “Whispers from the Bay.”

The judges were members of co-sponsoring organizations, faculty at Florida universities and colleges, and past Florida Book Award members. These judges awarded “Whispers from the Bay” the Gold Medal in an unprecedented unanimous vote.

Governor Charlie Crist presented Tkac with the award at a March 25 ceremony in Tallahassee.

Dolphin novel a splash with BR middle school

If you haven’t read John Tkac’s 2008 coming-of-age novel “Whispers from the Bay,” you could
have just stopped by Woodlawn Middle School on Tuesday night and gotten a pretty good
idea of what you were missing.

The Baton Rouge public school showed off almost two months of imaginative student work.

The story — about a stuttering sixth-grade boy in Key Biscayne, Fla., who learns to communicate
with dolphins — inspired the Baton Rouge students to create dolphin-cutouts, videos, essays
on what dolphins would say if they could talk, even a Jackson Pollacklike abstract ink-drip
depiction of a beach scene.

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