Michelle F. Solomon / ArtburstMiami

NWS will open its 33rd season at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 17 with a special WALLCAST Concert at North Miami’s Dezerland Park Drive-In Theater.

In an effort to help keep one of the city’s most valuable assets viable, the mayor and City Commission - in partnership with the Miami Beach Cultural Arts Council - approved distribution of $1 million in funds to 13 arts groups.

Edwidge Danticat was one of 29 authors (and one of two from Miami) tapped to write a short story for the magazine’s project, a 21st century pandemic bookend of sorts to Giovanni Boccaccio’s almost 700-year-old “The Decameron,” which was written in the midst of a global epidemic of bubonic plague that hit Europe and Asia.