R. Baxter Miller

R. Baxter Miller is an American writer and professor at University of Georgia. His book The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes won the 1991 American Book Award.

Early Life

The son of Marcellus Cornelius and Elsie Bryant Miller, Ronald Baxter Miller was born in Rocky Mount, NC on October 11, 1948. One of eight African Americans to integrate Rocky Mount Senior High School in 1963-64, he later graduated magna cum laude from N.C. Central University in 1970. During the interim, he was a fellow in the Intensive Summer Studies Program, sponsored by the Ford Foundation, at Yale University in 1969.

Career

Having defended his dissertation in December, 1973, Miller graduated from Brown University with a PhD. in English in 1974. In addition to writingThe Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes (1989; paperback 2006), he introduced and edited the internationally acclaimed Black American Literature and Humanism (1981). One of five co-editors And Co-authors to bring out Call and Response: the Riverside EDition of African American Literature (1998, 2003), he specializes in the study of poetics across the centuries. His most important essays are extensively revised and published as Artistry of Memory (2008). Of his ten volumes, the critical edition Black American Poets between Worlds, 1940-1960 (1986) is an academic bestseller, and The Southern Trace in Black Critical Theory (1991), a critical study, helped establish the new series of the Xavier Review Press. In many ways, On the Ruins of Modernity: New Chicago Renaissance from Wright to Fair (2012) represents his most mature critical analyis and theory, reprising his imaginative restructuring of American literary canons. The commissioned editor of Langston Hughes: the Short Stories (2002), Miller has completed Critical Insights: Langston Hughes, a new edition to appear in 2012. He has earned both the Langston Hughes Award and the Ford-Turpin honor for the stewardship of African American critical legacy.

Works

• ; paperback University Press of Kentucky, 2006, ISBN 978-0-8131-9152-2

• The Southern Trace of Black Critical Theory. Xavier Review Press (Louisiana) 1991. ISSN 0887-6681
• A Literary Criticism of Five Generations of African American Writing: The Artisry of Memory Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-7734-4966-4
• On the Ruins of Modernity: New Chicago Renaissance from Wright to Fair (Common Ground, 2012). ISBN 978-1-86335-969-6, ISBN 978-1-86335-970-2

Sources

• Killens, John Oliver and Jerry Ward, Jr. Black Southern Voices (1992).
• Miller, R. Baxter. Artistry of Memory (2008).
• Ostrom, Hans, ed. Encyclopedia of African American Literature (2005).
• International Author and Writer's Who's Who (1986).
• Who' Who in America (1996-).
• Who's Who in Education (1996-).
• Who's Who in the World (1996-).