Florida Palms by Joe Pan
Author Interview + Book & Author Info
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Florida Palms
The Outsiders meet Sons of Anarchy in this gripping debut about a group of young men dragged into a drug-running operation.
It’s 2009, the height of the Great Recession. Best friends Eddy, Cueball, and Jesse are fresh out of high school and wild at heart, but the economy is in the dumps. With jobs scarce along Florida’s Space Coast, they join a furniture-moving company run by Cueball’s father, a gruff ex-con biker who’s supposedly retired from the fast life. But when a mysterious old boss arrives in town, the payload is switched out, and the young men are coerced into shipping a new designer drug up the East Coast.
What is advertised as a bastion of brotherhood and respect quickly spirals into back-alley deals, bloodshed, and an all-out turf war that will test the bounds of love and friendship. Enticed by larger paychecks, and fueled by burgeoning drug habits, the young friends find themselves trapped between rank opportunists, warring gangsters, meth zombies, crazed bikers, and a blowgun-wielding hitman, all vying for a shot at the big time.
Soaring, ambitious, and deeply humane, Florida Palms is a gritty coming-of-age story with enormous heart and an unflinching vision of the violence and inequities facing forgotten communities. In a relentless race against desperate circumstances, the young friends must fully embrace the crime life or abandon their loyalties and risk ending up face down in the muck of the unforgiving swamps.
One of CrimeReads’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025
“If Florida is purgatory with a sun, Florida Palms exposes what happens to the young men who grow up in the shadows—a tightly plotted page-turner filled with gangsters, brotherhood, and betrayal. Joe Pan is an extraordinarily skilled writer, but his genius is his empathy, understanding that good people sometimes do bad things. What if you turned eighteen in the wrong neighborhood and found yourself surrounded by drug dealers, bikers, and eccentric hitmen? These are characters no reader will forget.”—Alexander Boldizar, author of The Man Who Saw Seconds
“Florida Palms offers up a crew of freewheeling philosophers on bikes, whose cynicism and violence—and the bizarre, hilarious screeds by which they justify themselves—are counterbalanced by the naive, heartbreaking humanity of the young men swept along in their wake. Pan’s love for Florida and its rougher, neglected corners is evident and intoxicating.”—Stephanie Soileau, author of Last One Out Shut Off the Lights
“Thrilling, suspenseful, and intricately plotted, Florida Palms shines an unsparing light on the tenuous, violent lives of young men trying to survive in a world that does not want—or see—them. Joe Pan, writing with urgency, vision, and uncommon empathy, does not turn away from these fractured and fragile lives, and neither should we.”—Elizabeth Wetmore, New York Times Bestselling author of Valentine
Purchase your copy of Joe Pan’s debut novel at: Bookshop.org, Amazon, and B&N.
Florida Palms — Interview with Joe Pan
Florida Palms is both crime fiction and coming of age. How do those two genres work together for your debut?
Well, the novel focuses on a group of poor young Florida kids who get swept up in a drug-running operation headed by one of their fathers, an ex-con biker who served his time in San Quentin before going straight—at least for a time. So we get to see these kids come of age in a time of desperation, at the height of the Great Recession, the promise of jobs and housing stolen from them. With few options, they turn to criminality.
What’s interesting perhaps about the combination of genres is that we get to watch them deal with becoming adults as they struggle with big life-changing questions of morality while they’re still trying to figure out who they are, at a basic level.
Another great point of tension is between a young Cueball and his father Bird, one of the kingpins of a newly formed “club” that’s part biker gang part drug cartel. Cueball is wary of running drugs for his old man but doesn’t see a way out of it, so we get to watch familial scuffles threaten to take down everyone at once.
Tell us about Eddy, Cueball, and Jesse, equal protagonists in Florida Palms. What would you like readers to know about the trio?
There’s young kids like them in every small town in America, kids fresh out of high school and looking for work while also hoping to preserve some element of their youth. They want to throw wild parties and have sex and fuck around, but now they’ve got all this responsibility thrown in their laps, and they’re bound by economic circumstances to accept whatever job they’re handed—be it roofing or construction or moving furniture—or fashion out of pure instinct of self-preservation a living wage doing whatever they must.
This was a solid set up for gray moral areas and ethical dilemmas, which is something foisted upon them—no high school counselor ever champions the benefits of becoming a drug runner. It’s all circumstance and proximity and economics. I’d like folks to remember that criminals are often just people lacking in options, working with a bravery most of us will never be asked to dig down to utilize or interrogate.
Florida Palms is set in 2009. Why did you choose that year for your debut?
It’s the height of the Great Recession, which I remember well. My grandmother’s tiny house in West Melbourne, Florida, was suddenly worth $20,000, and whole neighborhood was for sale. Lots of foreclosures and job layoffs, people scrambling. A perfect set-up for a new designer drug to hit the market.
Tell us about your road to publishing Florida Palms:
It took over two decades to get my novel to this place. I’ve rewritten it a hundred times at least. That’s not hyperbole. Not that it was the only thing I worked on, I’ve published five poetry books and some nonfiction and have written other novels I’m reworking now, but it was my true love and I wanted it to be my first piece of longform fiction because it’s closest to my heart, and contains a lot of stories from my childhood.
You are the founding publisher and editor-in-chief of Brooklyn Arts Press. How did you come to launch that project and what kind of work do you publish?
I began BAP with my own book. Yep, I’m a self-published indie author, and proud of it. I sent my poetry book out to other authors, and they wrote back! It was incredible.
I was living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and everyone was doing their own DIY project. Dancers starting their own dance companies, filmmakers their own production companies, artists their own magazines and art galleries. I began approaching artists and writers about doing books and it just grew out of my desire to work with them, while I hacked away at my own prose and poetry.
We got a lot of press for a National Book Award win and after that I bought another publishing company, Augury Books, and did that for a while. When I moved out to LA I decided I was going all in on writing fiction, and hit the brakes on the publishing.
What’s something about you that we won’t find in a press package?
I have an insane collection of Garbage Pail Kids, which few people know was created from the glorious mind of artist and Pulitzer Prize winner Art Spiegelman.
Words of Wisdom for Aspiring Writers:
Those who don’t quit and make writing a business will find their place in literature.
It’s a daily habit, a ritual, and you must work at it like a job. You will probably not make money at it but you will build a spirit, and a voice, and a curiosity that will help you see into an active historical present that is mostly lies and mostly fog for others.
Florida Palms Debut Author Joe Pan
Joe Pan’s debut novel, Florida Palms, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in July 2025 and has been optioned for a TV series by HBO.
Author of five poetry collections, Pan’s work has appeared in such publications as the Boston Review, Hyperallergic, the New York Times, the Philadelphia Review of Books, and Poets & Writers, and has been profiled in the New York Post, Publishers Weekly, the Rumpus, and the Wall Street Journal.
Joe is the founding publisher and editor-in-chief of Brooklyn Arts Press, a small press honored with a National Book Award in Poetry, and is publisher of Augury Books, honored with a Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry. With his wife he co-founded Brooklyn Artists Helping (BAH), which serves unhoused populations with sleeping bags, backpacks, and goods. He lives in Hollywood, California.
Follow Joe’s author journey by clicking any of the following links: Website, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.
Elena Hartwell/Elena Taylor
