Kei Miller Interview
Kei Miller, the 28-year-old Jamaican poet, fiction writer and essayist who is in residence this fall at the University of Iowa International Writing Program, calls his homeland “a remarkably religious country.” And although he no longer actively practices religion, he views the power of religious ritual, scripture and ecstatic experience is an enduring model for what he hopes to achieve in his writing.
“It’s the one trope that comes up again and again in all of my work—modeling things off of religious experience,” he says. “I think I have a relationship with the church from growing up, even if I walked a little bit far from that place. Writing is always ritual, and scripture teaches you how to make work powerful. I think religion is also destructive and awful and sometimes I like to talk about it, and use the language of religion to critique it…
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Jamaican Writer Kei Miller Aims for the ‘Goose-Pimply Moment’
In: Poetry
Authors: Kei Miller
Date Recorded: March 04, 2009
Program: --
Format: reading
Topics: Jamaica, poetry, identity, voice, narrative, religion