Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer

With ample insight, candor, and lyricism, poet, scholar, editor, and anthologist E. Ethelbert Miller reflects in these pages on his childhood in the South Bronx, his college days at Howard University, and his ongoing development as a husband, father, poet, and African American author. Fathering Words explores how Miller's family and friends shaped his life—in particular, his father Egberto, who came to the U.S. from Panama, and his older brother Richard, who became a monk and died young. With straightforward honesty punctuated by humor and warmth, the quietly pensive Miller offers a memoir of individual as well as universal truth—an original yet familiar story of fathers and sons, families and responsibilities, artistry and awareness.

E. Ethelbert Miller is a founding member of the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C., and a commissioner for the D.C. Commision on the Arts and Humanities. He has served as a visiting professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; an associate faculty member of Bennington College; and the Jessie Ball DuPont Scholar at Emory & Henry College. MIller has won several honors, including the 1995 O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize and an honorary doctorate of literature from Emory & Henry College. The editor of several anthologies, including In Search of Color Everwhere, Miller lives in Washington, D.C.