Tyler Gillespie is a writer, independent greeting card maker, and the palest Floridian you'll ever meet. He’s an award-winning journalist and the author of The Thing about Florida: Exploring a Misunderstood State (University Press of Florida, 2021) and two poetry collections — the nature machine! (Autofocus, 2023) and Florida Man: Poems, Revisited (Burrow Press, 2024). He’s the co-editor of The Awkward Phase (Skyhorse, 2016), and his humor writing can be found in the New Yorker, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and LGBTQ Comedic Monologues That Are Actually Funny.
His reporting appears in Rolling Stone, The Guardian, GQ, VICE, The Daily Beast, Playboy, and other outlets. Gillespie is a fifth-generation Floridian and wrote the introduction for A24’s Florida! A Hyper-Local Guide to the Flora, Fauna, and Fantasy of the Most Far-out State in America.
He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans and a PhD in English: Writing, Rhetoric, & Technical Communication from the University of Memphis. In 2021, he won the X. A. Kramer, Jr. Outstanding Teaching Award at the University of Mississippi. Gillespie teaches at Ringling College of Art and Design, where he is currently the Writing Program Coordinator.
Lauren MacLeod represents him at Aevitas Creative Management.