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Prizewinning poet and writer, Harriet Levin Millan's third book of poetry, My Oceanography (CavanKerry) was released October, 2018. Inspired by the work and life of minimalist sculptor Eva Hesse, these poems are both timely and constant. Hesse escaped Nazi Germany on the kindertransport at the age of five. She fought for recognition in the 1960's male-gender dominated art world, a world that still bears resemblance to women's struggle today for gender equality.
Harriet's previous poetry books also grapple with trauma and memory. When Eavan Boland chose Harriet's debut book of poetry The Christmas Show (Beacon Press 1997) for the Barnard New Women Poets Prize, she called her a "beautiful lyricist," a poet whose work demonstrates "the erotics of history." The Christmas Show also won the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Ellen LaForge Memorial Poetry Prize. The Philadelphia Inquirer named it a Best Book of the Year. Harriet's second poetry book, Girl in Cap and Gown (Mammoth Books, 2010), was a National Poetry Series finalist, It was also a PEW Fellowship in the Arts discipline winner. Harriet's debut novel, How Fast Can You Run: a novel based on the life of Lost Boy of Sudan Michael Majok Kuch (Harvard Square Editions, October 2016.) was originally excerpted in The Kenyon Review, currently the nation's #1 literary journal. Profiled on NPR, How Fast Can You Run won an Independent Publishers Award, a Living Now Award for books that enhance people's lives, and it was selected as a Charter for Compassion and a Mothering Across Continents Global Read. With Martha Pennington, Harriet co-edited Creativity and Writing Pedagogy: Linking Creative Writers, Researchers and Teachers, (Equinox 2014). This book includes essays by notable writers including Dorothea Lasky, Alice Flaherty, Robin Hemley, Xu XI and others to present unique views of creative practices. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Harriet has used her writing and teaching to promote grassroots change in South Sudan, Haiti and the U.S. The Reunion Project, which she founded with her family and her Drexel University students, (fictionalized in How Fast Can You Run), reunited South Sudanese immigrants with their mothers living abroad. Harriet received a M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. At Iowa, she also worked as a translator for the International Writing Program, an experience which has continued to shape her interest in literature beyond the U.S. Her first published poem appeared in The Iowa Review when she was a student at the University of Iowa. Also, at that time, she won Nimrod Journal’s Pablo Neruda Award for Poetry. Since then, her poems, short stories and essays have been widely published in journals such as Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, PEN America, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly Review, New Letters, The Forward and The Smart Set . She’s held residencies at Yaddo, The Virginia Center for the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center, and she visited Kenya with Summer Literary Seminars and South Sudan on a Drexel University International Travel Award and Ukraine, Poland and Israel on a Drexel University Creative Research Award. She is Director of the Certificate Program in Writing and Publishing at Drexel University, where she teaches writing in the English Department on the undergraduate level and in the MFA Program in Creative Writing. For the past seven years, she has been leading Drexel University undergraduate creative writing students on a trip to Haiti focused on PEN Haiti outside Port-au-Prince. Besides Drexel, Harriet has taught writing at New York University, The University of Pennsylvania, Rosemont College, The College of New Rochelle, Temple University, Hunter College Campus High School, New York State Poet-in-the-Schools, and at several writers conferences including The Iowa Summer Writing Festival, the Catskills Writers Conference and the Festival of Writers and Writing at St. Mary’s College, Maryland. In December 2018, she launched My Oceanography at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. She is a dynamic speaker who has appeared on stages nationally and internationally to promote writing and activism. Harriet is a 2022-23 Stein Family Foundation Fellow. |
