I’m not a major CMS expert, but I’d say that unless you’re looking to have a major role for community authoring, Drupal or its main multi-user competitors would be overkill. For those environments, it’s great. Obviously, 43f runs it, as does DIY Planner and KnoxViews (two other places in my regular reading).

But for a relatively small number of authors, and limited need for comments, i.e., if you want to just publish, I don’t know how much easier you can get than WordPress. Your blog postings are obviously its core competency, but you can set up separate categorized pages for your “writing samples”. You can get some really clean minimalist themes for it that may fit the bill for a site where you want people to focus on your writing rather than the sidebars. If you’re a CSS weenie, you can get a good starter template from the plaintxt.org folks that you can customize to your heart’s content.

Examples:

• WordPress features
• Example WordPress page that’s not a blog entry, at my work site
• My personal site, entirely run by Wordpress, where the front page isn’t a blog index, and where there’s a faked “blog” subfolder with all the blog entries.
• plaintxt.org, where I got the Barthelme theme for my work site, and the Sandbox theme I customized for my personal site.