Carmen M. Pursifull

Carmen M. Pursifull (born September 1, 1930) is a former New York City Latin dance and Latin American music figure of the 1950s, and since 1970 in Illinois, is an English-language free verse poet who was a top ten finalist nominee for Poet Laureate of that state in 2003. Since late 2009 she has been a local public television personality in the Champaign-Urbana area.

Born Carmen Maria Padilla in New York City, she was the youngest of five children to a Puerto Rico-born father and his Army bride from Barcelona, Spain. She grew up in New York City where she left high school after her first marriage in 1946, ending her formal education.

Thereafter she was a member of a New York City interpretive dance troupe, and in 1950 at age twenty she was recruited by Frank "Killer Joe" Piro to partner with him teaching Cha-Cha-Cha and Mambo at the Palladium Ballroom at 53rd St. and Broadway in Manhattan. This thrust her into the center of the Latin dance craze of the time. She became a featured vocalist with Latin American bands in New York City, belonged to American Federation of Musicians Local 802 (Greater New York City), toured widely in the United States, and had extended engagements in the Caribbean including the Caribe Hilton Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico with Miguelito Valdés and His Orchestra in 1953 and with Ray Wallis and His Calypso Band at the Virgin Isles Hotel in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands in 1954.

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