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Noon Edition

Alyce Miller, on the theme of animals

"God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages."

- Jacques Deval, Afin de vivre bel et bien

Alyce Miller's most recent book, Water, won the Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2009 Paterson Prize. She is the author of two other books of fiction, The Nature of Longing, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and a novel, Stopping for Green Lights.  Her work has also won the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Excellence, the Lawrence Prize, and numerous special mentions in Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Stories, Best American Essays, etc.  A recent  essay, "All My Children," selected by Kathryn Harrison, appears in the current Ploughshares issue on creative nonfiction.

She has published more than 150 poems, stories, and essays in magazines and journals, and is completing a memoir, Home Repair, in addition to a series of essays on animals. A recent essay, "Naming Dogs," appearing in the current issue of Florida Review, describes her experience working with damaged pitbulls rescued in  a dogfighting raid here in Indiana. A transplant from the San Francisco Bay Area, which she still considers "home," she leads a double life in Bloomington, Indiana, as a professor in the English department at Indiana University, and as a pro bono attorney specializing in animal rights law.  She calls poetry her "third genre," and says that writing poetry opens up new spaces for her prose.

On this edition of The Poets Weave, Professor Miller reads her poems "Lion in Suburbia," "Elegy for My Cat," and "Christmas Lambs."

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