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Inauguration opened a new world for poet

Elizabeth Alexander's Praise Song for the Day , the inauguration poem that helped deliver Barack Obama into office, was in the making for almost half a century, surely for three generations: The grandmother who sang lullabies, poetry set to music. The parents who took their 1-year-old daughter to the Lincoln Memorial to hear Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech. The husband who emptied the house of the two boys, because, more than anything, Alexander needed hushed space to muster words and thoughts, then distill them into something beautiful, powerful, memorable.

``For me, the challenge was to be absolutely precise and pristine with the words,'' says Alexander, 47, who will read Praise Song in English and Spanish at Miami Book Fair International at 5 p.m. Sunday.

The challenge would be met with a muted ode to the ordinary rhythm of life, with words about routines and journeys, bridges and love and, perhaps most poignant, about possibilities.

Authors juggle different duties

Follow Lisa Black around on her workday and you might uncover the plot behind her next mystery novel. It might even be in the little notebook she pulls out to jot notes and ideas for characters or sequences.

But don't be fooled. While the ideas may come

from her day job, Black, a forensic specialist with the Cape Coral Police Department, devotes almost all of her off-the-clock time to writing. And then there is the new demand on Black's time -- promoting her books.

Turkish novelist draws a big crowd

Miami is a town all too frequently -- some might say stupidly -- obsessed with celebrity. And yet, on a breezy Friday night at Miami Dade College, a Turkish novelist drew a bigger audience than a movie star who appeared the evening before him.

And not merely a bigger audience. An overflow audience. An audience that left no seat empty and stranded about 100 hopefuls outside.

So went the Miami Book Fair International's final ``Evenings With . . . '' event with Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk reading from his latest novel The Museum of Innocence and telling the crowd, ``I am happy to be with the book lovers of Miami.''

There's some bilingual mingling going on

Every year, Miami Book Fair International generates high expectations among Spanish-language readers who enthusiastically greet authors from throughout the Hispanic world. But the fair also gives writers from the United States, Canada and Miami the opportunity to present their books in Spanish and to mingle with their English-language colleagues.

Arriving just in time for this year's fair is the season's most anticipated book, Fidel y Raul: Mis hermanos (Aguilar/Santillana), Juanita Castro's memoirs as told to Maria Antonieta Collins, already in its second printing after only a two-week run.

``It's the most well-sold book in all of my life,'' says Juan Manuel Salvat, director of Miami's Libreria y Ediciones Universal, which sold 700 copies in one weekend. ``They were ingenious with the promotion, because the secret is not a secret: I knew that she had collaborated with the CIA. But among Cubans there were few real CIA agents. . . . The book has a lot of information about the youth of the Castro

Group of women set reading record at Miami Dade College

Looking to break a Guinness World Record and promote human rights at the same time, Elizabeth Sanchez Vegas decided to embark on a 10-day reading marathon at the Miami Dade College's Inter-American Campus in Little Havana.

Sanchez Vegas of Miramar recruited five other women from her year-old group called the International Solidarity for Human Rights -- The New Generation to help her.

And that they did -- while making history.