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Lovalerie King
Miller, Eugene Ethelbert (1950– )
E. ETHELBERT MILLER is an African-American poet
born to a Panamanian father and a mother with
paternal West Indian heritage in the Bronx, New
York. Growing up in an ethnically diverse neigh-
borhood, he lived with his parents, Egberto and
Enid, and his older siblings, Marie and Richard, in
New York, until he left to attend college at Howard
University in 1968. After graduating with a degree
in Afro-American Studies in 1972, he worked at
the African American Resource Center at How-
ard, which he has directed since 1974. He cur-
rently teaches in the Bennington Writing Seminars
but has also held visiting positions at Emory and
Henry, George Mason University, American Uni-
versity, and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Miller entered college at the height of the BLACK
POWER and BLACK ARTS movements. HAKI MAD-
HUBUTI, AMIRI BARAKA, JOHN KILLENS, and SONIA
SANCHEZ were popular when Miller began writ-
ing. On the Howard campus, he came under the
influence of critic STEPHEN HENDERSON and liter-
ary elders STERLING A. BROWN and Leon Damas.
Miller was drawn in the 1980s toward the aesthetic
and political ties between black America and op-
pression in other countries. His understanding
of global issues evokes empathy and understand-
ing across cultures. Friendships with writers like
JUNE JORDAN and Ariel Dorfman have augmented
his political vision. Defining himself as a literary
activist as well as a writer, he is an indefatigable
networker, sharing information about publishing
and personal contacts. He began the Ascension
Poetry Reading Series in Washington to make up
for the lack of publishers for African-American
writers. The series lasted from 1974 to 2000, or-
ganizing more than 100 readings, and it included
Puerto Rican, Asian-American, and Arab-Ameri-
can writers.
Miller has published nine books of poetry: An-
dromeda (1974), The Land of Smiles and The Land
of No Smiles (1974), The Migrant Worker (1978),
Season of Hunger / Cry of Rain (1982), Where Are
the Love Poems for Dictators? (1986), First Light:
New and Selected Poems (1994), Whispers, Secrets
and Promises (1998), Buddha Weeping in Winter
(2001), and How We Sleep on the Nights We Don’t
Make Love (2004). Responding to the lack of pub-
lished anthologies of African-American poetry
when he was growing up, he collected poems for
In Search of Color Everywhere, which won the 1994
PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. He also ed-
ited three other anthologies, Synergy: An Anthol-
ogy of Washington, D.C. Poetry (1975), Women
Surviving Massacres and Men: Nine Women Poets
(1977), and Beyond the Frontier (2002). His most
recent edited anthology, Beyond the Frontier: Af-
rican American Poetry for the 21st Century (2002),
features the next generation of emerging African-
American poets. In addition, his first memoir, Fa-
thering Words: The Making of an African-American
Writer (2000), chronicles his career and pays trib-
ute to the lives of his brother and his father, who
died prematurely when Miller was in his 30s. That
book was chosen for the second annual Washing-
ton, D.C., We Read program.
Miller’s work contains the voices of charac-
ters surviving and grieving during revolutions in
Latin America by responding to antidemocratic
regimes in Chile, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. HeMiller, Eugene Ethelbert 357