E. Ethelbert Miller

1950 –
Read poems by this poet

Eugene Ethelbert Miller was born in the Bronx, New York, on November 20, 1950, and received his BA in African American studies from Howard University in 1972.

Miller’s poetry collections include How We Sleep on the Nights We Don’t Make Love (Curbstone Press, 2004); Buddha Weeping in Winter (Red Dragonfly Press, 2001); Whispers, Secrets, and Promises (Black Classic Press, 1998); and First Light: New and Selected Poems (Black Classic Press, 1994). He is also the author of the two memoirs The 5th Inning (PM Press, 2009) and Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer (Black Classic Press, 2000) as well as the editor of numerous anthologies, including the highly acclaimed In Search of Color Everywhere (Stewart Tabori & Chang, 1994), which received the 1994 PEN Oakland/ Josephine Miles Award. His work has been translated into multiple languages.

Miller’s honors include the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award given by Poets & Writers; the 1994 Columbia Merit Award; the 1982 Mayor’s Arts Award for Literature in Washington, D.C.; the O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize; and a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. In 1979, the mayor of Washington, D.C., proclaimed September 28, 1979, as “E. Ethelbert Miller Day,” and on May 21, 2001, “E. Ethelbert Miller Day” was proclaimed in Jackson, Tennessee. In 1996, Miller was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature from Emory & Henry College, and on April 19, 2015, he was inducted into the Washington, D.C., Hall of Fame.

Miller is the founder and director of the Ascension Poetry Reading Series, one of the oldest literary series in the Washington area. For a decade, he served as the editor of Poet Lore, the oldest poetry magazine in the United States. He also served as a commissioner for the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities from 1997 to 2008, is a board emeritus member at the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, and is the former director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University, a position he held for more than four decades. Miller has taught at American University, Bennington College, Emory & Henry College, and George Mason University, among other institutions. He formerly served as the board chair of the progressive think tank the Institute for Policy Studies. Miller lives in Washington, D.C.