Julia Garisto
When it comes to music and culture, Julie Garisto is the resident local yokel at tbt*. Having been in the Tampa Bay area since she was in diapers — cheated from the native title by the technicality of being born in Connecticut — Garisto grew up in Clearwater, raised by Italian-American immigrant parents.
In the past three decades (or so) of her life, she's visited thousands of venues and restaurants, and heard countless bands.
She wrote for the St. Petersburg Times as a free-lancer from 1992 to 2005 and became a permanent staffer in August 2005. Before that, she worked at Tampa Bay alternative newsweekly Weekly Planet (now known as Creative Loafing) as a copy editor and writer, a job that put her in contact with arts and music insiders, and as an editorial assistant at Beacon-Leader-Bee neighborhood newspapers, where she first acquired her knack for slice-of-life encounters with the small independent businesses of Pinellas County.
At tbt* and the St. Petersburg Times, she interviews local music artists weekly, recommends concerts, reviews bars and writes lifestyle features.