September 2010

I am journeying to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, North Carolina University, this month, to meet with a folklorist and to present Ticket to Exile and my new book of poems, The Sky is a Page at the Sonia Haynes Stone Black Cultural Center. The reading,a free event, will take place on the 29th at 7 pm. After the reading, I'll be entertaining questions and discussion of the materials in both books.

April 2010

I am looking forward to the appearance of The Sky is a Page, my new collection of poetry, which includes poems from some of the earlier books and several new poems from 2000-2010. The book is now at the printer and is due back (fingers crossed) by the end of this month.

I have long been a member of the Fresh Ink Poets Group which is also printing its most recent anthology, Fresh Ink VI. 

Several readings are set for this spring and summer (see my homepage for dates and locations). But perhaps most exciting of all is the work I am currently doing on the sequel to my memoir Ticket to Exile. The current title of the new book is Fall Rising and picks up where Ticket left off, as ADM steps off the train in Rockville Center, New York.

Ticket continues to find its audience, especially in college and high school classrooms. I was recently invited to speak at Berkeley City College, and I am going  to Saint Mary's College High School in Berkeley this month to talk with students. Often my audience of young people knows little about the Civil Rights movement or the Great Depression. Despite their lack of knowledge, those who read Ticket are engaged with the progress and growth of the young AD; they relate to him as someone who also struggles with coming-of-age, even if the historic period differs from their own. The students' comments and questions are perceptive and instructive.

February 2010

In February, when I went to South Carolina to attend its book festival, I had the pleasure of visiting Till Farm in Neeses, South Carolina, near Orangeburg. While there, I held a discussion with the Divas, an inter-ethnic group of professional and business women who had read Ticket.This gathering is unusual for the South and the U.S. and harks back to the time when such women as Lillian Smith of Strange Fruit and other women in and around Atlanta had conducted an inter-ethnic series of meetings during the 1950's. That group was trying to see what could be done to ameliorate racial discrimination and violence in the pre-Civil Rights era. They were extremely courageous women. 

It was exciting to meet the Divas, a modern group of such committed women who are exploring contemporary ideas as they work to solve contemporary problems. 

Portrait of Adam David Miller is by Berkeley artist Phoebe Ackley.