Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer - Softcover

Miller, E. Ethelbert

4.02

42 ratings by Goodreads

9780312270131: Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312270135 ISBN 13: 9780312270131

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2001

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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.

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About the Author:

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.

Review:

"Filled with page-turning, lyrical passages that speak to a passion for words . . . A fascinating examination of literary life still in progress."—Times-Picayune (New Orleans)

"Miller brings an accomplished poet's stunning language to this important memoir, and no one writes more eloquently about the lives—the triumphs and dilemmas—of black American men than he does."—Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage

"From deep within the soul of the accomplished poet that he is, Ethelbert Miller has given us a precious gem of a book, a book that will resonate with anyone who has experienced loss but remains determined to make a new day."—Jonathan Coleman, author of Long Way to Go: Black and White America

"Ethelbert's memoir of a writer laboring to give birth to himself is a poetic and achingly beautiful meditation on loneliness and desire, love and loss, on the paradox of life and love in this postindustrial diaspora that is 'America.'"—Lori Tsang, author of Circumnavigation and Passage and Totems

"Because of Mr. Miller's gifts for humor and for direct evocation of powerfully sad moments, this book is something of an emotional storm."—The Washington Times

"A poignant memoir that belongs in all collections of poetry and African American literature."—Library Journal

"Fathering Words is a book of many faces. It is an open-veined and honest thing, packed with poetic moves."—The Washington Post

"Modest and sincere, this restrained memoir also succeeds as a superb document of the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s and the current African-American literary scene."—Publishers Weekly

"A lovely coming-of-age story laden with pain and passion, testimony and gospel, laughter and love . . . Miller's wit and subtlety, his humor and generosity, marry with a language both efficient and rich."—Africana.com

"Miller strikes a perfect balance between prose and sheer poetic dialogue."—QBR: The Black Review

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