Miller, Wayne 1976-

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Miller, Wayne 1976-

PERSONAL:

Born 1976, in Cincinnati, OH. Education: Oberlin College, B.A.; University of Houston, M.F.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Kansas City, MO. Office—Department of English, University of Central Missouri, P.O. Box 800, Warrensburg, MO 64093. E-mail—waynemiller5@yahoo.com; wjmiller@ucmo.edu.

CAREER:

Writer, poet, translator, editor, and educator. University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg, assistant professor of English. Worked for the Manhattan District Attorney.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Bess Hokin Prize, Poetry magazine, 2001, for poems in July, 2001 issue; Ruth Lilly fellow, the Poetry Foundation; Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, the Poetry Society of America; George Bogin Memorial Award, the Poetry Society of America.

WRITINGS:

What Night Says to the Empty Boat (Notes for a Film in Verse) (poetry chapbook), Greentower (Maryville, MO), 2005.

Only the Senses Sleep (poetry), New Issues/Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, MI), 2006.

(Translator, with the author) Moikom Zeqo, I Don't Believe in Ghosts: Poems from Meduza, BOA Editions (Rochester, NY), 2007.

(Editor, with Kevin Prufer) The New European Poetry, Graywolf Press (St. Paul, MN), 2008.

Contributor to periodicals, including Epoch, Field, Boulevard, Chelsea, Crazyhorse, Gettysburg Review, Hotel Amerika, LIT, Paris Review, Quarterly West, and Sycamore Review. Editor, Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.

SIDELIGHTS:

Poet, editor, and educator Wayne Miller is an assistant professor of English at the University of Central Missouri. He is the author of four books of poetry and translator of the works of Albanian poet, writer, and archaeologist Moikom Zeqo. In Only the Senses Sleep, Miller presents a collection of thirty-five free-verse poems concerned with the night and the feelings, sensations, and experiences that humans can find there. "Emptiness haunts Wayne Miller—unfurnished rooms, human absences, each moment's retreat into the past—but from this void he fashions a quiet, [Georg] Trakl-influenced voice that lends feeling to the fragile, sensory world," observed Ned Balbo in the Antioch Review. For Miller, even the darkness contains places and objects that inspire the imagination and the pursuit of active thought. In "Empty Warehouse," Miller considers the structure and muses that "Its mere emptiness invites imagination, / which invited, enters." He argues that in darkness or light, the present steadily melds into the past, carried along by the experience of the day, as when he writes in "For the 20th Century" that "Our past hums red / like a blood slide held up to the light," and exhorts the listener: "Why not brush on another layer of red?"

Miller's work "sublimely captures … environmental experiences in the dark that pervade the corners of human consciousness," commented an Internet Bookwatch reviewer. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly remarked that the poet "describes both the visible and the invisible with elegant ease," and commented that "Miller's is a welcome new voice." Kansas City Star critic John Mark Eberhart stated that Miller "writes some very fine poetry."