Arthenia J. Bates Millican (June 1, 1920 – December 13, 2012)[1][2] was an American poet, short-story writer, essayist, and educator whose published writings include the books Seeds Beneath the Snow (1969), The Deity Nodded (1973), and Such Things from the Valley (1977).
Encouraged by her father to write,[3] Arthenia published her first poem, "Christmastide", in The Sumter Daily Item when she was 16 years old, while she was attending Lincoln High School (1934–37).
Moving to Halifax, Virginia, she married her first husband, Noah Bates (they subsequently divorced), and taught English from 1949 to 1955 at Mary Bethune High School.
[8] As the South Carolina Academy of Authors has noted: "By the time of the publication of her premier short-story collection, SEEDS BENEATH THE SNOW (1969), her work was being compared to that of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Zora Neale Hurston, and Thomas Hardy.
In her convincing local-color narratives—by turns disturbing, touching, humorous--of the daily lives and strivings of rural and small-town African-Americans in the South, Millican was hailed as following in the tradition of Hurston, Richard Wright, Ernest J. Gaines, and Alice Walker.