Enid Shomer, Author of "The Twelve Rooms of the Nile"

Enid Shomer won the Iowa Short Fiction Award for her first collection of stories, "Imaginary Men", and the Florida Book Awards Gold Medal for her second, "Tourist Season". She is also the author of four books of poetry.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and many other publications. "The Twelve Rooms of the Nile" (Simon & Schuster, 2012), is her first novel.

Ms. Shomer's work has been collected in more than fifty anthologies and textbooks, including "POETRY: A Harper Collins Pocket Anthology", "Best American Poetry", and "New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best".

"The Twelve Rooms of the Nile" is a fascinating account of the fictional (and intellectually and emotionally intense) meeting in Egypt of a young Florence Nightingale and the French writer Gustave Flaubert.

Shomer conducted extensive research about the concurrent Egyptian travels of Nightingale and Flaubert, and she has great insight into the early years of Nightingale's life.

This will be an edifying and exciting interview in which the myth and story of Florence Nightingale will play a central role.

In 2013, Shomer received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing from the Florida Humanities Council.  

The author lives in Tampa, Florida.