Gabrielle Calise is a Florida-based culture writer and editor obsessed with offbeat stories and nostalgia.
Gabrielle is the editor of A24's travel book Florida! A Hyper-local Guide to the Flora, Fauna, and Fantasy of the Most Far-out State in America. She currently reports on local history, music and shenanigans for her hometown paper, the Tampa Bay Times.
Rabbit holes she has fallen down include, but are not limited to: local strip club lore, ghost towns, spaceship houses, Florida’s long-lost hot dog girls and tourist attractions that don’t exist.
She shadowed a four-generation family of alligator trappers and went looking for roadkill with the state’s only pet taxidermist. Most recently, she trained to become a mermaid at Weeki Wachee Spring’s Sirens of the Deep adult mermaid camp.
As the editor of this nearly 600-page love letter to Florida, Gabrielle researched, wrote and edited original reporting, essays, lists, maps and more. She hired and managed a team of contributors from around Florida. She also assigned and edited chapter content, collaborated with the design team on visuals and worked with Florida creatives to license story excerpts and original essays.
Press: Vogue, New York Magazine, Nylon, Axios Tampa Bay, Axios Miami, It’s Nice That, InWeekly, First Coast Connect with Melissa Ross, Miami New Times, Tampa Bay Times. Creative Loafing Tampa Bay also deemed it the “Best Big Ass Book About Florida” in the Best of the Bay 2022 awards.
Culture, music and nostalgia reporter, The Tampa Bay Times
2018 – Current
Gabrielle’s beat revolves around weird Florida, Tampa Bay history, local personalities and food culture. Her favorite stories answer the type of questions that you’ve thought about while driving down the side of the road, like, “How do you pronounce THAT?” and “What the hell is that thing?”
She founded the Tampa Bay Times’ Florida Wonders series to chase down answers to reader queries. Before that, she worked on Tampa Bay Times’ audience engagement team as a social media producer, leading a digital brand redesign for the paper and shaping audience strategy.
Read the stories here.
Read Poynter’s article on nostalgia writing, how Gabrielle created her beat and her favorite projects.
Jeff Pearlman interviewed Gabrielle for his podcast, “Two Writers Slinging Yang.”
Contributing writer and editor, Wildsam Field Guides
2021
In Wildsam’s Gulf Coast guide, Gabrielle shared the geography, traditions, and cultural institutions from my favorite corners of the South. As a contributing writer and editor, she interviewed Floridians including a wild animal trapper, an Ybor City cigar roller and a retired Weeki Wachee Springs State Park mermaid who once swam for Elvis.
This almanac delivers a deep dive into the heritage of the Gulf Coast through news clippings, timelines, writings and other historical hearsay.
Etc.
Gabrielle was a 2020 finalist for Outstanding New Journalist in the Society of Professional Journalist’s Florida Sunshine State Awards.
She traveled to Berlin as a reporting fellow with the RIAS German-American exchange program in 2018.
These days you can find her in St. Petersburg, riding a red bicycle and looking for story ideas. Gabrielle also sings and plays guitar in a multi-generational, all-female punk band called Hex Appeal, formed during Ladies Rock Camp. Separately, she is trying to master the art of homemade hummus so she can make her Lebanese mother proud (yes, she’s even interviewed her, too!)