Benjamin J. Kirby is a writer living in St. Petersburg, Florida. He is also a communications expert, community advocate, and political professional.

His poems have appeared in the journal Half and One, Cathexis Northwest Press, and Wingless Dreamer‘s 2021 Spring Anthology. CANEBRAKE, an unpublished Florida crime novel, received an Honorable Mention in the 2020 Black Spring Press Crime Fiction Prize. 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-recognized, 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.

Benjamin is a communications expert, community advocate, and political professional. He served as the Communications Director for the Mayor of St. Petersburg, Florida. Currently, he is the principal of BJK Consulting, a strategic communications firm, leveraging decades of experience to help identify and engage audiences.

Born in western North Carolina and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, Benjamin lives in St. Petersburg, Florida with his wife, Kendra, his children, Emeline, Finnegan, and Elle. 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 Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.