Author featured in reading series

Poet Wayne Miller will visit Northwestern College to read from his current book, “The Book of Props,” as well as his next book, “The City, Our City,” on Tuesday, Nov. 16, at 7 p.m. in Te Paske Gallery of the Korver Visual Arts Center. Miller comes to campus as part of the Deep Song Reading Series. The event is free and open to the public.

Miller is the author of two poetry collections, “The Book of Props” and “Only the Senses Sleep,” which received the William Rockhill Nelson Award.  His third collection, “The City, Our City,” will be published in the fall of 2011. He is also coeditor, with Kevin Prufer, of “New European Poets” and translator of Moikom Zeqo’s “I Don’t Believe in Ghosts.”

“The Book of Props” focuses on how human beings derive and inscribe meaning from and into their physical environments. In “The City, Our City,” Miller portrays “the City” as representing all cities taken as a whole, with all the good and bad that entails.

Literature is “losing its broad mainstream American audience right at a time when the Internet, the 24-hour news cycle and our current political ‘widening gyre’ have created an environment in which we need, more than ever, the nuanced attention to language and empathy that literature provides,” Miller says. “The kind of attention literature requires is a counterweight to the problems of our time.”

Miller lives in Kansas City and teaches at the University of Central Missouri, where he is editor of the literary journal Pleiades.