Kei Miller is a Jamaican poet, essayist and novelist, shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and winner of the prestigious Forward poetry prize for his collection THE CARTOGRAPHER TRIES TO MAP A WAY TO ZION. His story collection FEAR OF STONES was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, and his most recent novel, AUGUSTOWN, was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award, and won the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Prix Les Afriques, and the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde. In 2010, the Institute of Jamaica awarded him the Silver Musgrave medal for his contributions to Literature, and he was awarded the Anthony Sabga medal for Arts & Letters in 2018. He has taught at the Universities of Glasgow, Royal Holloway and Exeter, and in 2019 he was the Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor to the University of Iowa.

Books by Kei Miller

Things I Have Withheld: Essays

by Kei Miller - Essays, Nonfiction

In a deeply moving, critical and lyrical collection of interconnected essays, award-winning writer Kei Miller explores the silences in which so many important things are kept. He examines the experience of discrimination through this silence and what it means to breach it --- "to risk words, to risk truth; and through the body and the histories those bodies inherit" the crimes that haunt them, and how the meanings of our bodies can shift as we move through the world, variously assuming privilege or victimhood. Through letters to James Baldwin, encounters with Soca, Carnival, family secrets, love affairs, questions of aesthetics and more, Miller powerfully and imaginatively recounts everyday acts of racism and prejudice from a black, male, queer perspective.