Ciara Miller

Ciara Darnise Miller was born and raised on the West Side of Chicago, down the street from Rockwell Housing Projects. She discovered her talent in writing at a very young age. Fresh out of 8th grade, she was offered an internship as a writer at Gallery 37, a competitive Center of the Arts in Downtown Chicago. It was there that she honed her creative writing skills and gained recognition as a talented, young fictionalist. She later ventured off into performance poetry, becoming an active member of Young Chicago Authors, a program located on the north side of Chicago which provides student-centered, artist-led workshops which encourage self-expression and literacy amongst the youth between the years 2002-2005. The Chicago “Louder than a Bomb” Poetry Slam allowed her to compete against other performance poets in and outside of the city. She competed in the San Francisco Poetry Slam in 2003; her team was the only one comprised of teenagers to make it to Finals. In 2004, she made it onto the Chicago All-Star team to compete in Los Angeles at the National Poetry Slam (Brave New Voices). Her team ranked fifth in the nation.She has performed at various high schools and colleges throughout the United States, including: Lane Tech, Berkely High, Chicago Academy of the Arts, MaryMount College, Milliken University, and Sarah Lawrence College. Journalists for The Reader and the Chicago Tribune have written articles about her dedication to her crafts. Not only was Ciara a high school writing tutor, a poetry slam coach and competitor, a secretary at Young Chicago Authors, typing many of the poems that appear in the Young Chicago Author's anthologies, she did most of this while raising her baby sister, taking her to almost every open mic she attended.Ciara has been published in various Young Chicago Authors publications. Her works have also appeared in “StarWall Paper”, “What I Know Is Me—Black Girls Write about Their World,” and more recently, "The SLC Review" (a prestigious Sarah Lawrence College publication), in which her essay entitled “Voyeurism in the Fitting Room?: (Un)Closeting Black Freak Shows in The Bluest Eye and The Third Life of Grange Copeland was the only analytical essay to make it into the book.Ciara has been a part of two poetry groups: “Grammatical Era” and currently, “The Collective.” Each group has worked toward critiquing one another’s poetry so that the strength of the team's writing can be evident on stage.Her writing style has been regarded as incomparable. She approaches writing by taking influences from any speck of a truth she can find. She is pleased to have shared the stage with or conversed with: Saul Williams, Patricia Smith, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Taylor Mali, Tara Betts, Marlon Esguerras, Avery R. Young, Krista Franklin, and Denizen Kane.Ciara currently attends Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York with a focus in Africana Studies. She has also worked on many "Art in Action" projects at her school which urges audience members to define what art means to them so that their individuality will not be taken over by conventionality. The summer of her freshman year of college, she journeyed back to Chicago and established a performance poetry program for GED students. She is an educator, active creative writer, performance poet, analytical essayist, playwright, and screenwriter who is currently working on a television show tentatively titled “Jassy.” For more information regarding the upcoming sitcom, feel free to contact her. She is also available for booking.
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