Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer

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.