For Ricardo Sosa-Melo, graduating from UF didn’t mean leaving The Swamp behind.
So, he wrote his way through the transition.
Sosa-Melo, a UF alumnus, filmmaker and writer, turned three years of college memories into “Alligator Meat: A Memoir,” a collection of six creative nonfiction stories that began as his English thesis. Months later, those carefully reconstructed memories made way for “6 7: Poems,” a collection of 67 poems capturing the uncertainty and absurdity of postgraduate life published in March.
Now, Sosa-Melo is extending “6 7: Poems” beyond the page by recording an audiobook version.
“I feel like those two books are almost like siblings or almost like enemies because they’re so in contradiction of one another,” he said.
The difference between the two books extends to their narrators. Sosa-Melo described the voice in “Alligator Meat: A Memoir” as lyrical, psychological and deeply self-aware. The narrator in “6 7: Poems” is bold, sarcastic and flippant.
Sosa-Melo, who grew up in Tampa, graduated from UF in Spring 2025 with bachelor's degrees in English and media, production, management, and technology. Now working at an advertising agency in Tampa, he balances the two creative interests that shaped his time in Gainesville: filmmaking and writing.
At the agency, Sosa-Melo creates and edits commercials while continuing to pursue his own film projects. A film he shot in Gainesville last summer was recently selected for a film festival in Fort Lauderdale, he said, and his filmmaking background has also shaped how he approaches his books.
“Alligator Meat: A Memoir” began when Sosa-Melo realized he’d never fully processed parts of his college experience. Instead of writing a traditional memoir, he selected six moments that best represented what he experienced and learned at UF.
The title reflects his complicated relationship with the university. Although he’s a proud Gator, Sosa-Melo said some experiences left him feeling like “discarded meat.”
Writing the collection also required him to revisit experiences he rarely talked about, like those he addressed in the fifth story, “Strawberry Vodka.”
The writing process changed how he viewed his time at UF.
“For a lot of UF, I was like, ‘I need to escape The Swamp. I need to get out of The Swamp,’” he said.
But writing and later sharing the collection forced him to reconsider those years. There were difficult experiences and growing pains, he said, but there were also positive moments that formed who he is today.
If “Alligator Meat: A Memoir” carefully reconstructs the past, “6 7: Poems” embraces the instability of what comes next.
Sosa-Melo began writing poems after graduation as thoughts came to him while doomscrolling, reading texts or recalling past experiences. Unlike the detailed storytelling of “Alligator Meat: A Memoir,” post-grad life felt fragmented, so poetry felt like a natural medium for him to capture it.
The title came partly from the “6-7” internet trend, which interested him because it could mean anything or nothing. That contradiction reflected how he felt entering life after college.
When Sosa-Melo narrowed over 80 poems down to 67, the title became literal, too.
“‘6 7’ is like, ‘I don’t care what you think. This is me,’” he said.
For longtime friend Caroline Glaister, Sosa-Melo’s ability to transform personal stories into relatable experiences has become a defining part of his writing.
Glaister, who has known Sosa-Melo since their freshman year of high school, had already heard many of the stories that eventually appeared in “Alligator Meat: A Memoir.”
“It’s one thing to be talking about some things that happen to you as a friend and another thing to be able to actually translate that into a story,” she said.
Glaister read “Alligator Meat: A Memoir” while she was still in college at Florida State University. Although she wasn’t experiencing the same things Sosa-Melo described, she connected with the larger feeling of being “trapped in The Swamp,” unable to see much beyond the bubble of college.
Years before Sosa-Melo wrote about UF, his former Pasco High School English teacher, Carolyn Graham, saw the contrast between the person he was in the classroom and the writer he became on the page.
Graham remembers Sosa-Melo as a reserved student who surprised her when he asked her to read and edit one of his early books. To Graham, his quietness was one of the qualities that made him a writer.
“Part of him being so quiet is that he’s an observer,” she said. “He’s taking those things in because everything’s material.”
But “Alligator Meat: A Memoir” and “6 7: Poems” remain snapshots of two versions of himself: one trying to understand what happened and another figuring out what comes next.
“There’s lightness, there’s darkness; there can be both,” Sosa-Melo said. “You never know which one is going to hit, but just keep going forward.”
Contact Aaliyah Evertz at aevertz@alligator.org. Follow her on X @aaliyahevertz1.
Aaliyah is a journalism junior at UF and the Fall 2026 theater and film reporter. This is her fourth semester at the Alligator and her third semester on The Avenue. In her free time, she enjoys reading, baking and listening to podcasts.
