We did a thing, and Purple Ink Press was born. We have started with two banging calls for submissions for The Bimbo Feminist Anthology and to Celebrate Hip-Hop’s 50th Anniversary. Click over and check us out!

Richard Blanco
https://richard-blanco.com/

Selected by President Obama as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in U.S. history, Richard Blanco was the youngest, the first Latinx, immigrant, and gay person to serve in that role. In 2023, Blanco was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami in a working-class family, Blanco’s personal negotiation of cultural identity and the universal themes of place and belonging characterize Blanco’s many collections of poetry, including his most recent, Homeland of My Body, which reassess traditional notions of home as strictly a geographical, tangible place that merely exist outside us, but rather, within us. He has also authored the memoirs FOR ALL OF US, ONE TODAY: AN INAUGURAL POET’S JOURNEY and THE PRINCE OF LOS COCUYOS: A MIAMI CHILDHOOD.  Blanco has received numerous awards, including the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize, the PEN American Beyond Margins Award, the Patterson Prize, and a Lambda Prize for memoir. He was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and has received numerous honorary degrees.  Currently, he serves as Education Ambassador for The Academy of American Poets and is an Associate Professor at Florida International University.  In April 2022, Blanco was appointed the first-ever Poet Laureate of Miami-Dade County.

Nicole Tallman
nicoletallman.com

Nicole Tallman is a poet, writer, and editor. Born and raised in Michigan, she lives in Miami and serves as the official Poetry Ambassador for Miami-Dade County, Editor of Redacted Books, Poetry and Interviews Editor for The Blue Mountain Review, and an Associate Editor for South Florida Poetry Journal. She is the author of Something Kindred and Poems for the People (The Southern Collective Experience (SCE) Press). Her next book, FERSACE, is forthcoming in November 2023 from ELJ Editions. She is also the creator and host of ELJ Editions/Redacted Books’ Be Well Reading Series and the Lunchtime Poetry & Jazz Series at Miami-Dade County’s Main Library. Find her on social media @natallman and at nicoletallman.com.

Dr. Mark B Kelly
markbkelley.com

Mark B. Kelley earned his PhD from the University of California, San Diego. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Florida International University. He has held fellowships with the Peabody Essex Museum, Mystic Seaport Museum, the John Carter Brown Library, the University of Virginia, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. His book projects are Sentimental Seamen: Feeling Bodies in An American Age of Sail and Pirates of Sympathy: Oceanic Inheritances in Antebellum Domestic Culture concerning transoceanic sentiments on ship and onshore.

Jane Hanson

Instagram

Jane Hanson is a poet living in Italy. She regularly posts stunning views to her Instagram of her life and pets in Italy and her beautiful poetry. She is an editor for the forthcoming anthology Facing Goodbye from The Wee Sparrow Press.

Elisa Albo

Elisa Albo is an award-winning professor of composition, literature, ESL, and creative writing at Broward College. A contributing editor of Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Harassment, Empowerment, and Healing, her poetry chapbooks are Passage to America, based on her family immigrant story, and Each Day More, a collection of elegies. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Alimentum, Bomb, Crab Orchard Review, Irresistible Appetites, MiPoesias, Notre Dame Review, Poetry Super Highway, SWWIM Every Day, Two-Countries: U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents, and Vinegar and Char. Nominated in 2021 for a Best of the Net award, she is an associate editor for the South Florida Poetry Journal and co-produces the Seahawk Writing Conference at Broward College, where she also teaches a food-themed film and literature course. Born in Havana, she lives with her family in Fort Lauderdale.

Julie Marie Wade 
www.juliemariewade.com

Julie Marie Wade is the author of 16 volumes of poetry, prose, and hybrid forms, including the newly released lyric essay chapbook, Fugue: An Aural History (New Michigan Press, 2023) and the forthcoming lyric essay collection, Otherwise Autumn House Press (Autumn House Press, 2023), selected by Lia Purpura as the winner of the 2022 Autumn House Nonfiction Book Prize. A winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir and a recipient of grants from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Julie has taught in the creative writing program at Florida International University since 2012. She lives with her spouse Angie Griffin, and their two cats in Dania Beach.

Clayre Benzadón
clayrebenzadon.com

Clayre Benzadón is a University of Miami MFA graduate student alumni and graduate of Brandeis University. She is currently a poetry reader from Split Lip Magazine and Broadsided Press‘s Instagram editor. She is also the former Managing editor of Sinking City. Her chapbook, “Liminal Zenith,” was published by SurVision Books. https://www.survisionmagazine.com/bookshop.htm  She was awarded the 2019 Alfred Boas Poetry Prize for “Linguistic Rewilding.” Additionally, her work has been featured in places including ANMLY, Fairy Tale Review, Hobart, MudRoom Magazine, Pussy Magic, Kissing Dynamite, and other publications.

Lynne Barrett
www.lynnebarrett.com

Lynne Barrett’s third story collection, Magpies, received the Florida Book Awards fiction gold medal, and she’s the editor of Making Good Time, True Stories of How We Do, and Don’t, Get Around in South Florida. She’s received an Edgar Award for best mystery story, and teaches Creative Writing at Florida International University. 

Erik Ebright
http://Eeeb.com

Erik is a fine artist, a web designer, and a web programmer. He identifies himself as everyone’s brother. He’s a world traveler and most recently lived in Miami, Florida, O‘ahu, Hawaii, and currently lives in Puerto Rico. He’s also published several travel and art books.

Something very weird happened. Two journals agreed to publish the same piece. I didn’t know that could happen, but it did. Here is Enter into the House of Women in Antithesis Blog.

Three of my flash nonfiction pieces are in Chapter House Journal

They answer the questions: How does a motherless child drive around on a car’s floor end up in a house of women?

How many buckets of water does it take to water Black Belly sheep at noon?

And what is the secret of the Paw paw tree?

Check out my new prose piece in Miniskirt Magazine’s Spooky Issue!

I get a bug in my ear: go to Big Apple Bookstore in Fort Lauderdale. It’s just three miles down the road,  but I haven’t been in two years. I usually buy my books online. My first choice is betterworldbook.com. They sell cheaply with free shipping. Next is the hated amazon. I’ll try to get the book used if I can wait. Usually, when the book shows up three weeks or a month later, I have forgotten it, and I’m surprised—a nice little gift in the mail.

 I’m looking for a specific book, Shakespeare’s sonnets. A surprising choice as I’m not fond of Shakespeare. Actually, I don’t mind Shakespeare, but I think his plays are meant to be performed. And they are as boring as dust just sitting on the page. Maybe if Patrick Stewart read them? Probably everything would be better with Patrick Stewart. But I like Shakespeare’s sonnets, and I’m working on my poetry. So I was hunting for the book.

Would you believe it was sitting on an outside table at the bookstore? The complete poems of Shakespeare, I have it before I walked in. But I am still excited to go in and nose around. I am taking a break from the piles of work at home, the poetry book I am putting together, the memoir I am editing, and my teenage who was staying home from school, who is also work.

I walk through the door, and I hear her voice. It’s a shrill shrieking, a bit quieter than a scream. The voice continues on and on. She isn’t screaming. She is talking. It just sounds like she’s screaming. I can’t see her. The sound of her is coming from behind a bookcase. She’s talking to the guy that works there. She shrieks, and he responds in a quiet rumble.

“I need a book for a one-year-old,” She says.

“A picture book would be your best bet,” he says.

“I don’t want to get a picture book,” she says.

“What else is going to work for a one-year-old?” he asks.

She doesn’t answer but changes the subject. “Did you notice that the building across the street is getting renovated?” he said.

I don’t hear his reply. I follow the shelves to the poetry section. One of the most fun things about this bookstore is that only some of the books are in order. The bookcases are well organized and orderly, but beneath each lay random boxes with jumbled books of the same subject. I would scan the neat shelves and hunt for treasure in the random boxes.

I can’t poke around today. Her voice is drilling like a spike in my head. I can’t think, and I can’t relax enough to browse.

Shrew.

I think of the word as she recounts where she took her driver’s license test in 1976. I was probably also thinking of Shakespeare’s play Taming the Shrew.

Dictionary.com defines Shrew as a woman of violent temper and speech. Her speech was certainly violent.

As I walk to the counter to pay for my book, I wonder if there is a male equivalent to a shrew. There are certainly men as annoying. I have been on dates with several of them—their voices droning on and full of bombast.

 She comes into view. I am surprised by how small and slight she is. She is standing next to the cash register. The guy who works there has disappeared. I thought that she was still talking to him. I am surprised to see two men standing close to her, apparently her audience. I haven’t heard a word from either of them.

Maybe she’s doing me a favor. I should get back to work an

I ring the bell at the counter, and place my books on the counter, The Complete Poems of Shakespeare, W.E.B. Dubois’ The Souls of Black Folk, and Selected Poems by Rilke. I’m almost shoulder-to-shoulder with her. She doesn’t move, and she doesn’t stop talking.

“I’ve met the founder of Island records,” she says.

At the sound of the bell, the bookstore guy pops out of the back. I think he was hiding from her and her voice. I spend $12 on three books. That’s hard to beat.

I step out into the warm afternoon, and her voice disappears behind the closing door. I pause a minute to survey the books stacked on an outside table one last time. I don’t want to miss any gems. The light twittering of birds replaces her shrieking din. I draw in a full breath

I feel fresh, like when you wake up after you’ve had a bad headache. I’m grateful; I need to get back to my typing anyway.