is a poet, educator, and occasional essayist with a fieldwork-derived practice.
Miriam’s work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. The author of In the Volcano’s Mouth (University of Pittsburgh, 2016), which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, Miriam grew up on an organic farm in rural Texas as the child of an uprooted Bronx Jew and a goat-raising anthropologist involved in the back-to-the-land movement.
Also the author of the chapbooks All night in the new country (Sixteen Rivers, 2013) and Pact-Blood, Fever Grass (Ricochet Editions, 2013), Miriam’s limited-edition artist book The Other World (Center for Book Arts, 2019) won the Letterpress Chapbook Prize in 2019. Miriam is the former poetry editor of – and a current reader for – the Dodge, a journal of eco-writing and translation (previously Artful Dodge), and a reviewer for Anthropology & Humanisim, the journal of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. Miriam has taught poetry and poetics at Stanford University as a Wallace Stegner Fellow; as a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell College (founded in Iowa by a cousin of the guy who founded the Cornell you’ve heard of); Westminster College in Utah; and at the National University of Singapore as The Arts House’s Singapore Writer-in-Residence. Miriam teaches academic and creative writing at the University of California – Berkeley and is a proud member of UC-AFT.
