Leslie  Kemp  Poole

BIOGRAPHY

 

Leslie Kemp Poole is an award-winning writer and historian. A fourth-generation Floridian, Poole has long been interested in the role of women in the state’s environmental movement and how they were saving the state’s important natural resources even before they were able to vote.

 

Poole is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. She received her PhD in History from the University of Florida in 2012. Her articles have been published in a number of academic journals and she regularly presents papers about her research at history conferences. In 2008 she appeared in the PBS documentary In Marjorie's Wake which retraced a 1933 trip on the St. Johns River taken by noted author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. In January 2019 she appeared in the PBS Documentary The Swamp, part of the American Experience series, talking about the history of Florida's Everglades. Poole also has worked as a freelance author for a number of magazines and publications.

Prior to working in academia, Poole was a reporter for several newspapers, including the Orlando Sentinel, where she helped pen a series of articles about Florida's lack of growth management that won a national award.

 

She lives in Winter Park, Florida, where she and her husband raised two sons.

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Bibliography:

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Tracing Florida Journeys: Explorers, Travelers, and Landscapes Then and Now (Gainesville, University of Florida Press, 2024)

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The Wilder Heart of Florida: More Writers Inspired by Florida Nature (Gainesville, University of Florida Press, 2021). Co-editor of volume and author of one essay.

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Biscayne National Park: The History of a Unique Park on the "Edge." An Administrative History. (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2021).

 

Saving Florida: Women’s Fight for the Environment in the Twentieth Century (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015).

 

Maitland (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia Publishing, 2009).

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