He spent six years in a Jesuit seminary, then did graduate work at San Jose State College and the University of California, Irvine.
He has won nine awards from the Poetry Society of America, and in July 1979, Miranda was chosen by the editors of the Atlantic Monthly to be the third poet-in-residence at The Frost Place, Robert Frost's house in Franconia, New Hampshire, after Katha Pollitt and Robert Hass.
His first collection, Listeners at the Breathing Place, chosen for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, was described as "inviting and impressive" in the Library Journal[6] Maxine Kumin called it "a first book to be proud of," and Miranda "a versatile and sensitive poet.
Robin Skelton, in The Malahat Review, said it "retains the brilliance of the original;" Robert Boyers, in Salmagundi, said, "Nowhere does it read like a translation."
Rilke Scholar John Mood called it "the nearest to a definitive Elegies we're apt ever to get in the English language."