Jane Miller (born 1949) is an American
poet
A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator (thought, thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral t ...
.
Life
Jane Miller was born in New York and lives in
Tucson, Arizona
Tucson (; ; ) is a city in Pima County, Arizona, United States, and its county seat. It is the second-most populous city in Arizona, behind Phoenix, Arizona, Phoenix, with a population of 542,630 in the 2020 United States census. The Tucson ...
. She served as a professor for many years in the Creative Writing Program at the
University of Arizona
The University of Arizona (Arizona, U of A, UArizona, or UA) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Tucson, Arizona, United States. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, it ...
—including a stint as its Director—and is currently Visiting Poet at The University of Texas Michener Center in Austin. She has published ten volumes of poetry of which ''The Greater Leisures'' was a National Poetry Series selection. ''Who Is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Questions'' (
Copper Canyon Press
Copper Canyon Press is an independent, non-profit small press, founded in 1972 by Sam Hamill, Tree Swenson, Bill O'Daly, and Jim Gautney, specializing exclusively in the publication of poetry. It is located in Port Townsend, Washington.
Copper C ...
, 2018) is her most recent book of poems.
Her numerous awards include a Western States Book Award, a Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Award, a Guggenheim fellowship and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Awards
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National Poetry Series
The National Poetry Series is an American literary awards program.
Every year since 1979, the National Poetry Series has sponsored the publication of five books of poetry. Manuscripts are solicited through an annual open competition, judged and c ...
Selection for ''The Greater Leisures''
*
Western States Book Award
Western States Book Award honored notable works of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and translation written and published in the Western United States. The award was given annually from 1984 until 2002. Lifetime-achievement awards were also p ...
for ''August Zero''
* Two
National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the feder ...
Fellowships
Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Award*
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon individuals who have demonstrated dis ...
*
Audre Lorde Award
Works
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"Life's Ironies," poets.org, 2014
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* ''Black Holes Black Stockings''
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* ''Heartbeats''
Anthologies
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Prose
* Seven Mediterraneans
Essays
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* "Sea Level."
''Ploughshares''
*"Scene", ''Ploughshares'', Spring 1979
*"Without a Name for This", ''Ploughshares'', Spring 1979
*"A Dream of Broken Glass ", ''Ploughshares'', Spring 1979
*"Eavesdropping at the Swim Club, 1934 ", ''Ploughshares'', Spring 1979
*"Blanks for New Things", ''Ploughshares'', Winter 1990-91
*"Warrior", ''Ploughshares'', Winter 1990-91
*"The General's Briefing", ''Ploughshares'', Winter 1991-92
*"Parts of Speech", ''Ploughshares'', Spring 1996
*"Humility", ''Ploughshares'', Winter 2001-2
Reviews
Poet Jane Miller collaborates with artist Beverly Pepper on a highly personal journey through the debris of the poet’s crumbling relationship, and her mother’s descent into illness. Beautifully rendered poems and short chapters of poetic prose combine with Pepper’s chalk and oil drawings to form an intimate and unique meditation on the nature of love, of heartache, of the many midnights we, each and every one of us, live through and carry with us through our lives.
A major accomplishment of Jane Miller’s Midnights is that she rescues middle-of-the-night ideas from worn-out truisms and offers them as the torturous realities they can be in experience.
Jane Miller is hardly alone in demanding that the structures of her art reflect the compulsions of consciousness, but unlike poets who allow pallid abstraction to attenuate emotion and song, Miller, as late millennium supplicant, won't relinquish extravagance, seduction, rapture, as essential elements of a poem's brash presence. Her human figure, careening through its volatile relations, "charge card in hand," indebted and reverential, makes of shatter a kind of atomized coherence, a kinetic, compassionate form.
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References
External links
{{DEFAULTSORT:Miller, Jane
1949 births
Living people
University of Arizona faculty
American lesbian writers
American LGBTQ poets
American women poets
American women academics
21st-century American women writers