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Twenty-three-year-old Christopher Poore opens the door with a warm and welcoming smile. He turns and walks back into his new office. A lounge area with couches and a wooden table are off to one side in front of a wall painted bright orange and green, the colors of his alma mater. 

His business partner Ron Rick ,23, enters the room sporting a buzz cut and green polo shirt with a muscle man logo on it. The two are laid-back entrepreneurs who became friends as undergraduates at the University of Miami.

All month long, WLRN and our partners at O, Miami Poetry Festival have been collecting poems either starting or ending in "That's So Miami" and compiling them on our Tumblr page. We have seen some amazing poems, and as the month begins to wind down, we decided to put the best theme poems up for a vote.

A universal favorite among Miamians: traffic.

What makes Miami's food culture so great?  Vote for a poem from our That's So Miami project that best describes a culinary favorite.

UPDATE: POLLS CLOSED AFTERNOON OF 4/25, WINNERS TO BE ANNOUNCED AT THAT'S SO MIAMI READING AND FINALE

One of the beautiful things about nuestra ciudad is the way that you can pasar todo el dia switching it up between English and Spanish, dependiendo del tema.

UPDATE: POLLS CLOSED AFTERNOON OF 4/25, WINNERS TO BE ANNOUNCED AT THAT'S SO MIAMI READING AND FINALE

Since Julia Tuttle’s arrival in 1891, Miami has grown like crazy: more people, more homes, more roads, more 

  boom. Dense tropical hardwood trees that covered the City of Miami were chopped down and urbanization moved west into the Everglades.

In celebration of National Parks Week, every national park in the United States is free of charge through Friday, April 26.

These include Everglades National Park and the Dry Tortugas National Park off of Key West.

For a complete list of Florida's National Parks, go to the website by clicking here.

One of the most contentious aspects of the plan to redevelop the Miami Beach Convention Center has been settled: The Fillmore Miami Beach at the Jackie Gleason Theater will stay.

The theater had been slated for demolition by Portman-CMC, one of the two teams still in the running for the massive overhaul project. But with music and history lovers lined up in support of saving the theater, the team said that its plan has changed.

“We listened to the community,” said Jack Portman, vice chairman of Portman Holdings and John Portman & Associates.

The Daniel Lewis Miami Dance Sampler was a mixed bag of performances that introduced audiences to contemporary dance, ballet, new flamenco and traditional African dance forms. The performances, billed as six- to eight-minute samplers, highlighted the scope of dance talent that exists in Miami. Produced by Dance NOW! Miami and Miami Dance Futures, the goal of the sampler is to give local talent exposure and to expose audiences to dance forms that they wouldn’t normally seek out.

All month long, WLRN and our partners at O, Miami Poetry Festival have been collecting poems either starting or ending in "That's So Miami" and compiling them on our Tumblr page. We have seen some amazing poems, and as the month begins to wind down we have decided to put the best of these poems up for vote.

Built in 1964 as part of the Cold War response to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Nike Missile Silo was abandoned in 1979, but the former complex remains eerily intact within the southern portion of Everglades National Park. It is a reminder of a time when South Florida was a focal point of international politics, and it's also one the region's more famous abandoned sites.

The Dania Beach Hurricane was the largest wooden roller coaster in Florida. Depending on your definition of "is" and "roller coaster," it might still hold that title. The ride shut down in April 2011, but the monstrous jungle of lumber still looms over I-95. The track is still there. The trains are still there. The Hurricane just doesn't run anymore.

And now the coaster's owners are trying to give the entire thing away to charity. But, no surprise, that's proving difficult. (You can listen to that story above.)

Today is Earth Day. 

And here in low-lying, hurricane prone Florida, the day has special meaning.

Sea-level rise is no longer something so incremental that we don't notice.

It's real and visible, and planning for a future of rising oceans has become a top priority for local towns, cities and counties across the state.

As today is Earth Day, a few Miami chefs chimed in on how they try to reduce waste or recycle at their restaurants.

Jen Chaefsky, owner and general manager of Macchialina:

“Our water glasses are made out of recycled wine bottles. It’s something small, but every little bit helps; plus it’s a cool element that guests love to learn about.”

Sam Gorenstein, chef and owner of My Ceviche:

When a mentally ill person entered a Connecticut school and slaughtered children and teachers, it was the last straw for some people. In this ultra liberal, politically correct climate in which we find ourselves today, the immediate outcry was to ban this and ban that. The very thought that teachers should not have the right to defend themselves and their pupils is laughable.

There was a real man in Key West who used to sell his homemade banana bread out of his bicycle nightly at the famous sunset celebration on Mallory Docks. I never saw him leave there with any bread leftover. Down in the Caribbean Banana Bread is considered a “man’s bread”. Perhaps the reasons are related to anatomy or maybe it’s the hefty dose of rhum included in the recipe.

We live in one of the best cities, proven by the fact that millions of people vacation here every year. But even in paradise, we get caught up in our daily routines. We let weeks or even months go by without heading to the beach, closing our eyes and enjoying the sounds, aromas and tastes that make our home such a worldwide draw.

We're here to help.

Miami's eclectic community of artists, local musicians, singers and fans will converge at Sweat Records and Churchill’s Pub on Saturday, April 20, for the 4th annual Sweatstock -- an 18-hour block party of live bands, up and coming DJs, coffee, ticket raffles and Crossfit competition. 

Stages will be set up outside of the two venues.

The Sweat Street Stage will feature local music favorites like Awesome New Republic and Beatmachines.

“When you contaminate the water, you contaminate yourself,” explains science teacher Bertha Vazquez to her students at Miami’s George Washington Carver Middle School. “You’re part of an ecosystem.”

Since 1991, Vazquez has taught students what they can do to save the planet through an integrated curriculum that weaves together science, human behavior and facts about climate change.

Join us for an hour of conversation about the week's news on The Florida Roundup, live at noon on WLRN:

The Florida Legislature is considering big changes to Citizens Property Insurance Corp.

The state-run insurer is supposed to be the last resort for property owners in high risk areas who can't get coverage in the private insurance market.

Citizens Property has about 1.3 million policy holders.

The company is trying to reduce its risk by raising premiums and sending hundreds of thousands of customers back to the private market.

Juan Ponce de León served as governor of Puerto Rico for a tumultuous five years. During that time, the native Taínos tried unsuccessfully to overpower him, but, in the end, it was the son of Christopher Columbus who unseated him during a political struggle for power in the New World. Ponce de León’s new “asiento,” or assignment, from Spain’s King Ferdinand II was to set sail and find – not the fountain of youth, as is widely thought – but the island of “Benimy.” After being at sea for nearly a month, he finally sighted land, but it wasn’t Bimini.

It was a humdinger of a story.

A Miami police officer in a marked squad car is pursued, pulled over and handcuffed by a Florida state trooper after speeding down the turnpike like race car driver Dale Earnhardt, Jr.

A dash-cam video of that pre-dawn October chase in 2011 went viral and sparked a three-month investigation by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper into how local police officers routinely endangered the general public through reckless driving.

It's been a busy week in Washington, D.C.

As lawmakers react to the Boston Marathon bombings, parts of the Capitol had to be evacuated after suspicious letters addressed to U.S. Senator Roger Wicker and President Barack Obama were intercepted at mail screening facilities.

While dealing with that scare, members of Congress are getting their first look at a proposal for immigration reform put forth by the so-called "Gang of Eight" Senators including Florida's freshman Republican Marco Rubio.

The following is a brief excerpt from a new feature article written by Jean Friedman-Rudovsky. The article appears today in the three South Florida county editions of the New Times. The excerpt below is reprinted with permission. Read the entire article by picking up the current issue at a local newsstand or by clicking on the link to the New Times website at the end of the excerpt.

                            * * *

April 19th, 1995

My Louisville-born husband wakes up from a dream he just can't seem to shake. He knows, of course, that I'm an Oklahoma City girl, though many years removed. It's April. It's a tornado, he thinks. Oklahoma City has been hit, he thinks. I'll turn on the TV, he thinks. That something is wrong, he knows.  

"KELLLLLLLEY!!!!!"'  

Last month, we introduced you to nine acclaimed authors who call South Florida their home, at least part-time. But that was just a small sampling. South Florida boats a tribe of critically acclaimed scribes living anywhere from the Florida Keys to Palm Beach County. Below are seven folks who are building on the tradition of hometown heroes like Dave Barry and Carl Hiaasen (who actually now lives just a little bit further north in Vero Beach.)

Much to the relief of Delray Beach arts lovers, the city has decided to let a popular cultural hub stay in the space it’s called home for the last two years.

The fate of the Arts Garage has hung in the balance since last summer, when a law firm offered to buy the city-owned property that the arts incubator occupies downtown.  Since then, Delray Beach has been forced to choose between the new jobs the law firm says it would bring and the wildly popular performance venue.

Education was a hot topic at the WLRN-Miami Herald Town Hall meeting in February.

Only a small portion of the questions that came in were asked during the panel discussion. But we're working to get as many answered as possible.

Deborah Nix from Delray Beach wanted to know:

In the mid ‘70s, I had recently left the Army and started working as an emergency physician at a hospital in Huntsville, Alabama. It was a Wednesday, church night, and I was working the evening shift.

A woman in her thirties was brought in with a bullet wound in her leg. She told us that her boy friend had shot her during an argument. The wound didn't look serious; bleeding was minimal. It appeared to have been caused by a 32- or 38-caliber hand gun. I placed her in a room, ordered an X-ray, and sat at the physician desk to write up the chart.