Kei Miller

The author of eleven books, Kei Miller lives between the United States and Jamaica, where he was born. Miller burst onto the literary scene as a writer of poems and short stories before turning his formidable talents to nonfiction. In 2018, he was admitted as one of “40 Under 40” into the Royal Society of Literature, a fellowship that highlights the United Kingdom’s next generation of bold voices. Things I Have Withheld (2021), Miller’s latest essay collection, explores the body, or as Miller puts it, “these soft houses in which we live and in which we move and from which we can never migrate, except by dying.” This stunning tour de force was a finalist for numerous prizes including the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Orwell Prize and earned Miller his second OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Nonfiction. Drawing on the intellectual lineages of Dionne Brand and James Baldwin, Miller gives voice to what is often left unsaid when it comes to race, sex, gender, and nation. Moving with grace across the overgrown terrain of the unsayable, Miller’s variegated oeuvre takes readers on a transformative journey through form and genre. Through his devotion to language’s potential to construct and reconstruct our humanity, Miller hopes we will arrive at a place of “respect; which is to say, dignity; which is to say, love.” Miller earned an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Glasgow. He is currently a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Miami in Florida.