Update: Miller did not take home the Grammy for Best Spoken Word Poetry album; the award went to J. Ivy for the album The Poet Who Sat By the Door.

Original:

When the 65th annual Grammy Awards air on Sunday, there will be a new category announced under the spoken word umbrella: Best Spoken Word Poetry Album. And followers of D.C.’s literary scene may recognize one name among the five nominees in the new category: E. Ethelbert Miller.

Miller, 72, is a poet and former professor at Howard, where he taught for over 40 years. His nominated album, Black Men Are Precious, is mixed with hopeful lines and painful truths.

The album’s title poem focuses on death — Miller says he wrote it after observing that a number of peers and Black men younger than him had died for different reasons. He first read it in public at a 2019 event in Maryland the day Congressman Elijah Cummings died. “I see the poem as being very spiritual,” Miller says.

In his last moments, Martin Luther King Jr. is said to have requested the song, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” This detail and his own grief inspired Miller to write the lead poem, which ends with the following verses:

“Black men, my friends resting in their
open coffins waiting for someone to sing
‘Precious Lord’ and take their hand. Black
hands closing with so much love still left
to give.”

Whether he wins or not, Miller says he hopes his nomination will inspire young poets who may want to walk a red carpet one day.

At the barbershop and on phone calls, friends and acquaintances have expressed their happiness for Miller, a Brightwood resident. The Grammy nod is a reflection of the impact open mics, poetry slams, and spoken word recordings have had on politics and society, he says.

“When you look across this country, and even the world, poetry has saved some people’s lives,” Miller says. “I’ve visited some prisons and seen guys who have poems they’re reciting … Poetry is very important for self awareness, self concept. It keeps you in tune with what’s going on in your surroundings.”

Miller grew up in the South Bronx and came to D.C. to study at Howard in 1968, when riots broke out across the city after the King’s assassination. With Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in tow, Miller decided to become a writer his sophomore year.

Poetry is as needed today as it was back in the tumultuous 1960s and 70s, he says.

“At this key moment, we see the need for poetry to address our country,” Miller says. Referencing the oft-quoted Mario Cuomo line, that politicians campaign in poetry but govern in prose, Miller adds: “I think before we govern in prose, we’ve got to make sure we know some poetry.”

Miller has published several books, including memoirs and poetry collections. His anthology The Collected Poems of E. Ethelbert Miller features his work across four decades. He previously served as an editor of Poet Lore, America’s oldest literary magazine, which is published by The Writer’s Center in Bethesda.

Miller won a number of prestigious awards and honors, but he’s perhaps most proud of his works on race, America, and baseball. In fact, he published two books inspired by the pastime: If God Invented Baseball (2018), and When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery and Other Baseball Stories (2021).

As someone who values record-keeping, Miller has donated boxes full of journals, correspondence, photographs, interviews, manuscripts, and other files related to his career to the Special Collections Research Center at George Washington University.

Though Miller is retired, he’s still very active in the local literary community. He interviews authors on his weekly WPFW program, On the Margin, and hosts a UDC TV show called The Scholars. This year, he plans to publish a poetry collection he wrote with Japanese poet and translator Miho Kinnas, which will feature a sampling of hundreds of call-and-response-style poems they’ve written together, he says. Plus, he’s working on a multimedia exhibit at American University’s Katzen Arts Center with Ethiopian visual artist, Kebedech Tekleab. (American University holds the license to WAMU, which owns DCist.)

Miller’s Grammy nomination — and the category in which he’s nominated — is the result of lobbying from the literary community that argued poetry shouldn’t be grouped with audiobooks and other narrative art forms — these works were formerly included under the general Best Spoken Word Album category.

“The move honors both the uniqueness of the poetry genre as well as the passionate work of its purveyors,” The Poet’s List blog states.

Miller is currently headed to Los Angeles for two-days of Grammy-related events, including a reception for the nominees on Saturday, he says. The Best Spoken Word Album award will be announced during the pre-telecast at 3:30 p.m. EST on Sunday, which will stream on the Grammy website and on YouTube.