About Ben Miller

Ben Miller is an essayist, fiction writer, and the creator of hybrid works that combine visuals and text. After attending Cornell College (Mount Vernon, Iowa) he received an M.A. from New York University, studying under John A. Williams, E.L. Doctorow, Wesley Brown, and Luisa Valenzuela.

To support the art pursuit, he has worked in a wide variety of day job settings, most recently in a hospital system in the upper midwest.

He is the author of the forthcoming Pandemonium Logs: A Clerk’s Tale (Skiff Books, an imprint of Rutgers University Press) and River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa (Lookout Books, an imprint of the University of North Carolina Wilmington Press). The latter book was short-listed for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.

His work has been published in many journals, including The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, The Yale Review, AGNI, Ecotone, Raritan, Fiction International, The Southern Review and One Story.

Seven of his essays have been cited as “Notable” by Best American Essays and another, “Bix and Flannery,” was chosen to appear in the anthology by Louis Menand. Chapter 12 of it all melts down to this: a novel in timelines can be found in Best American Experimental Writing 2020, a volume edited by Carmen Maria Machado and Joyelle McSweeney.

Miller’s awards include creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and grants from the South Dakota Arts Council and the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.

Currently he is developing a range of new fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid projects. Cage Dies Bird Flies, a multi-phase collaboration with painter Dale Williams, is also underway. So far the project has resulted in five sequences, each consisting of 81 distinct works that meld word and image. Sequence titles are Illuminations by the Slice, Giant Miniature Illuminations, The Luminous Dark: Landscapes Found and Lost, Catastrophic Cameos and The Hot Sea Scroll.

In 2018, he and historian Irmtrud Wojak led a Radcliffe Institute exploratory seminar entitled “Creating a Living Archive of Shared Humanity: The Fritz Bauer Library / Database of Remembrance and Human Rights.” (Fritz Bauer, a jurist, was the driving force behind the Auschwitz trials in Germany in the early 1960s.)

The first volume in the library–Full of Hunger and Full of Bread: The World of Jura Soyfer 1912-1939 by Dorothy James (and edited by Miller)–was published in German and English editions in 2021. It recounts the life of the Austrian writer Jura Soyfer who perished of typhoid fever at the Buchenwald concentration camp at age 28.

Also in 2021 his novel–Meanwhile, in the Dronx… (set in an invented 6th borough of NYC)–was named a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction: https://pen.org/pen-bellwether-prize/

Miller is married to the poet Anne Pierson Wiese, author of Floating City (LSU Press) and the forthcoming Which Way Was North (LSU Press). She has recieved the Walt Whitman Award from the American Academy of Poets, as well as the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship.