Well-versed in county bureaucracy: Miami-Dade mayor staffer now is poet laureate

Nicole Tallman’s job as a senior staffer under Miami-Dade County’s mayor puts her on the frontlines of county government’s many failings, mishaps and challenges. But that hasn’t stopped the administrator from looking up to revere what the sky has to offer on a clear day.

“In Miami, the sky turns pink then blue,” Tallman wrote in a sonnet titled “June,” released on Instagram last month for World Poetry Day. “It’s a scene I see every morning from my room. And I work so hard for this view.”

Her poetry offers a rare collection of literary introspection from within Miami-Dade County government, where Tallman works as chief of staff to a top deputy of Mayor Daniella Levine Cava. Now, the 49-year-old is moving into a more prominent role as the county’s official poet — a position Levine Cava created during her first term as mayor. This is the first time Miami-Dade’s poet laureate will be a county employee, too, pushing Tallman into the spotlight after years of behind-the-scenes work for public figures in local government.

“I want to thank my mother for reading poetry to me from a very, very young age,” Tallman said Wednesday onstage at the county’s Main Library, where Levine Cava named her the county’s final poet laureate before the term-limited mayor leaves office in 2028. “And to my father, who supported my love of reading.”

Tallman, chief of staff to the county’s chief operating officer, Jimmy Morales, said her workday usually starts around 7 a.m. “Don’t ask me when it ends,” she told the Miami Herald in between posing for photographs with friends from the O, Miami Poetry Festival and the outgoing poet laureate, Caridad Moro-Gronlier.

Moro-Gronlier praised Tallman as a “courageous poet” in part for her willingness to team up with other writers to create poems together. She also said Tallman tends to keep it tight on the page. “Many of her poems are short and accessible,” she said. “They’re digestible.”

One poem published in 2023 saw Tallman recreate a dream she had with her late mother. She titled it “Poem For the Dead (Including My Mom).”

“Since we’ll likely never be together again anywhere but here — what season were you most alive in?” Tallman wrote in the first three lines. It ended with these: “Do you still feel happiness? Would you return? To this Earth, this dream, or anywhere else?”

Tallman came to county government in 2015 as a speechwriter for Levine Cava’s predecessor, then-Mayor Carlos Gimenez. Tallman had the same job in the president’s office in Miami Dade College, and Gimenez’s staff recruited her to join “the 29th Floor” — the nickname given to the mayor’s suite of offices at the top of County Hall in downtown Miami.

“She captured Mayor Gimenez’s voice very well,” said Michael Hernández, Gimenez’s former communications director who is now a city commissioner in Pembroke Pines. “It was never melodramatic.”

Tallman is the rare senior aide to Levine Cava, a Democrat, who also worked with Gimenez, a Republican. She earns $208,000 a year as chief of staff to Morales, who oversees Miami International Airport, PortMiami, the county’s transit system and other agencies. While the poet laureate post comes with a yearly $5,000 stipend paid out as a county cultural grant, Tallman said she’s waiving the money for her two years in the honorary post.

Has her published work ever caused friction at her actual work? Tallman says no. “I’m careful about what I write,” she said.

She regularly posts her work on social media, and her fifth book of poems, “The Velvet Room,” comes out next year. That’s the title of a childhood book that Tallman loved and turned into a poem as an adult. She read the poem on the stage Wednesday at the county library.

“In fifth grade, I carried a grape Scratch & Sniff Sticker in my pants pocket wherever I went,” Tallman read. “I also carried a copy of a heavy, faded book the school librarian reserved especially for me.”