When should one decide to write a memoir? Why?
What can one learn from reading the memoirs of other writers?
How does one sort and select memories in order to create a personal narrative?
The workshop will include writing exercises to help participants examine their lives.
I will select and discuss poems that I’ve written during my 50 years as a literary activist. How did my work change? What social movements changed my voice? When do political poems fail and why are we often afraid to write them?
Credit: Tom Wolff
Ethelbert Miller‘is a writer and literary activist. He is the author of two memoirs and several books of poetry. For 17 years Miller served as the editor of Poet Lore, the oldest poetry magazine published in the United States. He hosts the WPFW morning radio show On the Margin with E. Ethelbert Miller and hosts and produces The Scholars on UDC-TV which received a 2020 Telly Award.
Miller’s memoir Fathering Words: The Making of An African American Writer (St. Martin’s Press, 2000) was selected by the DC WE READ for its one book, one city program sponsored by the D.C. Public Libraries. He was also awarded the 2019 Literary Award for poetry by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association for his book If God Invented Baseball.
Most recently, Miller received a grant from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities and a congressional award from Congressman Jamie Raskin in recognition of his literary activism. Miller’s latest book is When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery and Other Baseball Stories (City Point Press, 2021). Most recently he was nominated for a Grammy (2023) for his spoken word album: Black Men Are Precious.