Nancy Anne Miller Portrait 004_1
Nancy Anne Miller was born in Bermuda to a longstanding Bermudian family highly gifted in the visual arts. After moving to America in the 1960’s, she turned her own visual abilities back onto her island, firstly with photographs, and secondly with paintings. However, it was through her poetry that she was able to identify herself as an immigrant (I is for Immigrant), and once so named, her work flourished. Her two fine arts degrees enhance and enliven her poetry, the use of image metaphor is at the core of her work.
Nancy spent time in England during the late 1980’s to the early 2000’s, and considers her time in the UK to be her true education because of the access she had to the museums, galleries, bookstores, readings, lectures and performances available in London. She studied poetry with George Szirtes at the Norwich School of Art and Design, and then received her MLitt in Creative Writing from the Univ. of Glasgow. Her time in the UK opened the British literary scene to her, and it is where she firstly began to be published.
In 2009 she organized Ber-Mused, a reading by island poets for Bermuda’s 400th. Since then she is actively involved giving workshops on the island. Seven of her eight books: Somersault (Guernica Editions), Immigrant’s Autumn (Aldrich Books) Because There Was No Sea (Anaphora Literary Press), Water Logged (Aldrich Books) Island Bound Mail (Kelsay Books), and Boiling Hot (Kelsay Books) are about Bermuda. Her collection Star Map (FutureCycle Press) is about the four seasons as she has experienced them through an immigrant’s sensibilities. Previous to these collections, she had self edited and produced three collections backed by the Bermuda Arts Council. The Sun in ThreeCountries, Hurricane Season and Maiden Voyage were sold in island bookstores. These three grassroots publications taught her how to put together a poetry collection. Her work currently belongs in the Postcolonial Literature genre. Tide Tables is her most recent collection (Kelsay Books 2019.)
