Results

Gemini Ink’s programs serve children, youth and adults across San Antonio. We serve an estimated 3500 participants annually: 83% take our programs free of charge, and 67% of those served are people of color. With 25% of households in the city under Federal poverty and a population 63% Latino and 8% African American, our outreach into all corners of the city is especially significant.  Since 1992, we’ve increased access to the writing arts, grown literacy, and built joy in and engagement with reading and writing.

Staff

Alexandra van de Kamp
Executive Director
avandekamp@geminiink.org

Alexandra is the author of three full-length collections of poems: Kiss/Hierarchy (Rain Mountain Press, 2016) and The Park of Upside-Down Chairs (CW Books, 2010). Her recent collection, Ricochet Script, from Next Page Press was published in the spring of 2022. She has also published several chapbooks, including Dear Jean Seberg (2011), which won the 2010 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest. Her poems have been published in journals nationwide, such as The Cincinnati Review, Connecticut Review, 32Poems, Denver Quarterly, The Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art, and Washington Square. Her work has been nominated for five Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net.

Florinda Flores-Brown
Director of Programs
fbrown@geminiink.org

Florinda Flores-Brown is a writer, educator, and nonprofit professional from Laredo, TX, now living in San Antonio. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre and Dance from the University of Texas at Austin and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Goddard College. She currently works as Gemini Ink’s Director of Programs, through which she oversees creative writing workshops that help diverse communities across San Antonio bring their stories to life. Florinda has performed live stories at TPR’s Worth Repeating, Listen To Your Mother, Jump-Start Performance Company, and other San Antonio shows and venues. She also writes short fiction and plays.

Anisa Onofre
Marketing Director
aonofre@geminiink.org


Anisa has worked at Gemini Ink since 2009, when she was hired as the Writers in Communities director (now called Partner Classes), placing writers and artists to work in community settings such as public schools, senior centers, detention centers, and homeless and crisis shelters. From these projects, she has published numerous anthologies of poetry, fiction, prose, drawings, photography, recipes, and more. She has been Gemini Ink’s Marketing and Publications director since 2013. She is also a co-publisher at Aztlan Libre Press.

Joshua Cantú
Operations Manager
joshua@geminiink.org

Joshua Cantú joined Gemini Ink in 2018 as a marketing volunteer/intern and is now the operations manager. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Communication Arts from the University of the Incarnate Word. Joshua is multidisciplinary at heart, being a photographer, frustrated painter, blogger/essayist, poet, and now short story writer who is not yet ready to share his writing with the world. In his free time, Joshua enjoys watching telenovelas, starting books and never finishing them, and gobbling up varying podcasts & YouTube videos. If he’s not in San Antonio, he’s enjoying the sunny Southwest or mountainous Mexico.

Mandy Lynn Lara
Public Classes Coordinator
mllara@geminiink.org

Mandy Lynn is a member of San Antonio’s PuroSlam slam poetry team representing San Antonio in the national competition. She is co-founder of Raise the Whisper, a poetry and arts group dedicated to using art to help heal the effects of family rape. For the last four years, Mandy Lynn has worked with Write Art Out, Inc., a literary non-profit organization in San Antonio, and has lead writing workshops, hosted events, mentored emerging writers, and is currently taking a lead role in organizing Fresh Ink Youth Slam.

Catherine Burianek
Partner Classes Program Coordinator
cburianek@geminiink.org

Catherine is an artist, educator, and former editor with a MA in English from UTSA. A few of her poems appear in Sagebrush Review and Borderlands. During her free time, she works on projects, paints, reads, and plays board games with her family. She’s wanted to be a part of the Gemini Ink family since first learning of the organization 20 years ago, so this job has been a literal dream come true.

Cloud Delfina Cardona (she/they)
Marketing Coordinator
ccardona@geminiink.org

Cloud (she/they) is a poet and book cover designer from San Anto, Tejas. Cardona is the author of What Remains, winner of the Host Publications Chapbook Prize. They are the co-founder and co-editor of Infrarrealista Review, a literary nonprofit dedicated to publishing Texan writers. She has received editorial fellowships from Macmillan in collaboration with Latinx in Publishing and Texas State University’s Center for the Study of the Southwest. When she’s not working, she is cuddling with her two weiner dogs and curating her DJ sets.

Interns

Joelle Lamaie,
Programs Intern

Board of Directors

Charles Massiatte, President

Martin Rico, Executive Chair

Jay Brandon

Cary Clack

Andrea Lopez

Christa Squyres

Alexandra van de Kamp (Ex-Officio)

National Advisory Board

Andre Dubus III

Ben Fountain

Juan Felipe Herrera

Edward Hirsch

Debra Monroe

Urayoan Noel

Barbara Ras

Martha Rhodes

Richard Russo

David Shields

Naomi Shihab Nye

Joan Silber

Patricia Spears- Jones

Chuck Wachtel