Inspiring Conversations with Gabriel Garofano of Lost Poets

Today we’d like to introduce you to Gabriel Garofano.

Hi Gabriel, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Sure—although “briefly” is always a dangerous instruction for a writer.

I grew up as one of those people who was constantly trying to make sense of the world by turning it into sentences. I wrote before I had any idea what a writing life actually was—before MFA programs, before literary journals, before I understood that you’re essentially signing up for a lifetime of staring at walls and hoping a good idea happens.

Somewhere along that path, I met my friend Chris Purifoy, who was doing the same thing in his own way. We started trading pages, then trading ideas, and then, slowly, building this private creative ecosystem between us. We’d go on these little self-invented retreats, read each other’s drafts at ungodly hours, and construct a kind of ongoing conversation about art, meaning, attention—all the slippery things that modern life tends to bulldoze.

For a long time it was just that: a friendship anchored in making things and trying to stay awake to the world. But eventually we realized we’d built a kind of refuge—almost a small, accidental monastery of creativity and what we now call anti-loneliness. And instead of keeping it to ourselves, it felt natural to open the door.

That instinct became Lost Poets.

Today, it’s grown into something larger—a creative studio, a cultural project, a community—but the core hasn’t really changed. It’s still two friends trying to build spaces where people can feel less alone, pay deeper attention, and create things that matter.

Everything I do now, whether it’s writing, photography, teaching, or building Lost Poets, comes from that same through-line: trying to make meaning in a world that moves too fast to notice it.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
There are smooth roads?

If someone out there is coasting along without setbacks, I’d love to study them like a rare bird. For everyone else, the work of making anything—art, a life, probably any project— comes with the usual mouthfuls of dirt. Things fall apart, you doubt yourself, timing slips, money runs out, life happens, and you have to rebuild the whole machine while it’s moving.

You know, I don’t think the specifics of my struggles would make for great magazine reading. They weren’t fun when I was living them, and they’re not any more glamorous in hindsight. What does feel worth sharing, though, is the part of the story that still surprises me.

Lost Poets isn’t new. The seed of it—the sky-high dreaming, the shared notes app filled with ideas, the late-night Google Docs, the ridiculous belief that we could build a creative world—that was all happening ten years ago. Well it’s happening now too, but that’s when it started. We had pages and pages of concepts. Whole universes. Logos, taglines, strategies, half-built frameworks. And for a million reasons, none of it materialized. Life took over. The momentum died. Lost Poets became a graveyard of saved folders on old laptops.

And at the time it felt like a failure. Of course it did. We poured our hearts into those early visions, and then the thing just… ended.

Then, a decade later, when neither of us was looking for it, the whole project came back to life. It wasn’t even really planned. It just showed back up. The timing was right. The world had changed. We had changed. And suddenly this idea we’d abandoned had heat again.

Anyway, I’m not trying to offer a tidy lesson or moral here, but I do think there’s something quietly hopeful in that.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Lost Poets is one of those things that’s hard to describe without sounding a little unhinged or overly earnest, because on the surface it looks like a brand, but underneath it’s really more of a philosophy that’s sneaking around in a trench coat, low hat, and dark sunglasses.

At its simplest: Lost Poets is a creative studio and community project that we built around a pretty old-fashioned belief—that art still matters, that presence still matters, and that people are starving for depth in a world that keeps trying to flatten everything into content.

What we actually do takes a bunch of different shapes. We run two Instagram platforms—one with a big audience and one that’s more of a creative laboratory. We’re building residencies in Los Angeles and Paris in partnership with The Art of Elysium. We’re developing courses about how to sustain creativity without losing your mind. We’re designing retreats, salons, publishing channels—all these different ways of creating spaces where people can think, feel, and connect without the pressure to perform.

If I had to say what sets us apart, I think it’s that we’re not trying to be loud. The world does loud just fine on its own. We’re more interested in presence—the slow, quiet, attentive kind that makes you actually feel like a human being. We care about conversation, about depth, about helping people feel less alone in their creative lives. And we take that seriously without taking ourselves too seriously.

Brand-wise, the thing I’m most proud of is that people seem to sense the heart behind it. They feel the intention. They feel the care. And that’s the whole point. We’re trying to build a place where people can breathe a little deeper, reconnect with their imagination, and remember that creativity doesn’t have to be a lonely pursuit.

If readers take anything away, I hope it’s this: Lost Poets isn’t about being an artist in the capital-A sense. It’s about being awake. Being present. Being willing to make something—a sentence, a sketch, a conversation—that pulls you back into your own life.

We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
Risk is one of those concepts that seems simple until you’re inside it. People talk about it like it’s a math problem—uncertainty in, reward out—but to me it’s more of an aesthetic judgment. You’re weighing safety against the unknown, comfort against possibility, and whatever you choose maybe says something about who you are and what you value.

I don’t think of myself as a thrill-seeker. I’m not jumping out of planes or betting it all on a horse named Gizmo. But I do think I have a high tolerance for the kind of risk that involves identity—the risk of changing your life, or putting your work into the world, or choosing the thing that makes your stomach twist instead of the thing that lets you sleep easier at night.

That’s the strange thing about risk, whenever you’re facing it, you’re also facing yourself. You learn what excites you, what scares you, what you’re willing to lose, and what you absolutely refuse to compromise. Risk is a kind of personal truth detector.

And honestly, everything meaningful in my life—my writing, Lost Poets, the communities I’ve built—grew out of saying yes to the uncertain thing that felt alive instead of the stable thing that didn’t. So I don’t know if that makes me a “risk-taker,” but I do know that the most interesting roads in my life have always been the ones where I didn’t know exactly where they were leading and went anyway.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.lostpoets.org
• Instagram: @lostpoets.art

Image Credits
Lost Poets