Lu Vickers

As she was in the final stages of writing Remembering Paradise Park in 2014, Lu Vickers was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for fiction for excerpts for a novel in progress. She has also been the recipient of two Florida Book awards and three Florida Individual Artist Fellowships for fiction. In addition to writing Remembering Paradise Park (with C. Graham), she has written the novel Breathing Underwater and three other Florida history books: Weeki Wachee, City of Mermaids, Cypress Gardens, America's Tropical Wonderland, and Weeki Wachee, Thirty Years of Underwater Photography, with Bonnie Georgiadis. Remembering Paradise Park: Tourism and Segregation at Silver Springs covers the history of Paradise Park, a segregated park that was owned by the world renowned attraction Silver Springs from 1949 to 1969, and operated by Mr. Eddie Leroy Vereen. The book covers the park's history--through the voices of those who were there--against the backdrop of American segregation and includes chapters on other segregated parks, on African American history in Marion County, African Americans in Florida's tourism industry,and on the Civil Rights movement in Florida. The book contains over 100 photographs, many made by the legendary photographer Bruce Mozert of Silver Springs. In late 2015, Vickers worked with the Appleton Museum in Ocala, Florida to organize an exhibit showcasing Mr. Mozert's Paradise Park photographs. The exhibit ran from January 23 to April 24th, 2016.