Kei Miller (born 24 October 1978) is an award-winning Jamaican poet, fiction writer, essayist and blogger.
Miller was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. He read English at the University of the West Indies, but dropped out short of graduation. However, while studying there, he befriended Mervyn Morris, who encouraged his writing. Afterward, Miller began publishing widely throughout the Caribbean.
In 2004, he left for England to study for an MA in Creative Writing (The Novel) at Manchester Metropolitan University under the tutelage of poet and scholar Michael Schmidt. Miller later completed a PhD in English Literature at the University of Glasgow.
In 2006, his first book of poetry was released, Kingdom of Empty Bellies (Heaventree Press). It was shortly followed by a collection of short stories, The Fear of Stones, which partly explores issues of Jamaican homophobia. The collection was shortlisted in 2007 for a Commonwealth Writers' Prize in the category of Best First Book (Canada or Caribbean). His second collection of poetry, There Is an Anger That Moves, was published in 2007 by Carcanet Press. He is also the editor of Carcanet's 2007 New Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology. His first novel, The Same Earth, was published in 2008, followed in 2010 by The Last Warner Woman. That same year saw the publication of his poetry collection A Light Song of Light. In 2013 his Writing Down the Vision: Essays & Prophecies was published, and in 2014 a collection of poems for which he was awarded the Forward Prize, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion.Hilary Mantel chose The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion as one of her favourite books of 2014.
'I'm Popeye the sailorman'
Or whichever old tune he sang
Spiced up with a few hot damns
The sailorman
He made a comely row of trees
On each side of the country road
So that a daily sort of man
Driving beneath them in his lumber wagon
Might fancy himself lord of a private road
Right after the first few notes
All the goats turned their heads
They would get fed
He was a tall lanky guy
With stooped shoulders and a shy seemed studious face