Jim Wayne Miller (October 21, 1936 – August 18, 1996) was an American poet and educator who had a major influence on literature in the Appalachian region.
[1] He was raised with five brothers and sisters on a seventy-acre farm in North Turkey Creek, in Buncombe County, about fifteen miles west of Asheville.
He had studied abroad in Minden, Westphalia, Germany, the summer before his junior year on a homestay scholarship awarded by the Experiment in International Living.
In 1960 Miller received an NDEA Fellowship, making it possible for him to pursue graduate studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
After graduation, they moved to Fort Knox, Kentucky, where Miller taught English and German at a school on the military base.
He invents the figure of the Brier as an Appalachian Everyman, a voice for those voiceless people who are struggling to maintain their connection to a meaningful past.
As Joyce Dyer writes, "In his poetry he explores the meaning of his own Appalachian experience, but always places it within a broader regional and national consciousness."
Miller wrote satirical essays, articles about Appalachian history and culture, translations, reviews, editions of work by Jesse Stuart, anthologies, and fiction.
Miller made the following observation about his aim as a poet, according to Annette Hadley and Matthew Farrell of The Southern Highlands Research Center: "Growing up in North Carolina, I was often amused, along with other natives, at tourists who fished the trout streams.
"[3] Poet Robert Morgan praised Miller's first book of poetry, Copperhead Cane (1964), in these terms: "These poems shine as brightly as if they were written this morning.
"[4] Miller was one of the editors of Appalachia Inside Out, a two-volume anthology of Appalachian literature that demonstrates the richness of the culture and imaginative worlds of writers from the mountain South.
[1] In 1985 Western Kentucky University produced a thirty-minute documentary film on the life and poetry of Jim Wayne Miller.