Kei Miller was born in Jamaica in 1978. He read English at the University of the West Indies and completed an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. His work has appeared in The Caribbean Writer, Snow Monkey, Caribbean Beat and Obsydian III. His first collection of short fiction, The Fear of Stones, was short-listed in 2007 for the Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize. His first poetry collection, Kingdom of Empty Bellies, was published in March 2006 by Heaventree Press; his second, There Is an Anger That Moves, was published by Carcanet in October 2007. He is also the editor of Carcanet's New Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology. He has been a visiting writer at York University in Canada, the Department of Library Services in the British Virgin Islands and a Vera Ruben Fellow at Yaddo, and currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow.
And now everybody get the understanding that Gilzene did get. A man cannot rise on his own. Not even a powerful man like Alexander Bedward. Him did need us. Him did need Augustown. It was we who had to push him up into the sky. It was we who had to show our faith to the governor and everybody else.
a hymn then not to birds but to words which themselves feel like feather and wing and light, as if it were on the delicacy of such sweet syllables that flocks take flight.
How much have we not seen or felt or heard because there was no word for it -- at least no word we knew? We speak to navigate ourselves away from dark corners and we become, each one of us, cartographers.
To know a man properly, you must know the shape of his hurt - the specific wound around which his person has been formed like a scab. .
