Benjamin J. Kirby is a writer living in St. Petersburg, Florida.

His poems have appeared in isotrope: Literary Journal, Gabby & Min’s Literary Review, and the Ulu Review, a member of the CLMP (Community of Literary Magazines and Presses). Half and One, a creative space for “cartoons and comics, journalism and narrative non-fiction, poetry and fiction,” chose his poem, Alight, for publication in 2023. Cathexis Northwest Press published his poem, Train, in their October 2022 issue. In 2021, the journal Wingless Dreamer included The Fountain of Youth in their 2021 Spring Anthology, and his poem Cry Out, in another anthology entitled Crystalline Whispers.

CANEBRAKE, an unpublished Florida crime novel, received an Honorable Mention in the 2020 Black Spring Press Crime Fiction Prize., and was workshopped in Laura Lippman’s class at the 2022 Writer’s in Paradise Conference at Eckerd College. He won first place for his prompt in the 2020 Lewis County Writer’s Guild competition, benefiting the Doyle McKim Legacy Annual Scholarship, which supports writing students at Centralia College.

Benjamin worked in collaboration with acclaimed cellist Natalie Helm exploring Johann Sebastian Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Cello. He wrote a short story, ‘The Queen’s Cookfire’, inspired by the music, and read it before a live audience at the Sarasota Contemporary Dance Company.

Previous work has also included a top-ten selection in Creative Loafing’s Fiction Contest, has appeared in WordWrights Magazine, a publication of the Argonne House Press, and was published in the George Mason University’s literary magazine Apathy.

For more than eight years he published an award-winning, nationally-acclaimed, Newstex-syndicated political blog called The Spencerian. Now defunct, the Florida-based blog covered national and local politics, as well as federal, state and local government. Later posts also covered fatherhood and family life in and around the Tampa Bay region. The Spencerian was ranked by the Washington Post as one of the best state-based blogs in Florida, and was recognized locally as a must-read.

Born in western North Carolina and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, Benjamin lives in St. Petersburg with his children, Emeline, Finnegan, and Elle, and his dog, Cookie. While in public service in Washington, D.C., Benjamin received an undergraduate degree in Political Communication from George Mason University. In his free time, he reads, runs, bikes, and wanders around Florida’s natural places.

Follow him on Threads, X, Instagram and Facebook. His professional background can be found on LinkedIn.