Pamela Miller grew up on the South Side of Chicago and had no idea there was also a North Side of Chicago until she was 18. Since making this astounding discovery, she has lived all of her adult life on the North Side, where she has been writing and performing poetry for more than 30 years. Her work has been published in a wide variety of literary magazines and anthologies, including The Paris Review, Pudding, The MacGuffin, Wisconsin Review, Free Lunch, Primavera, Wicked Alice, After Hours, Dangerous Dames, Solace in So Many Words and many others. Her previous books of poetry include Recipe for Disaster (Mayapple Press), Mysterious Coleslaw (Ridgeway Press) and Fast Little Shoes (Erie Street Press). She was won awards from the Illinois Arts Council, the Feminist Writers Guild, the Jo-Anne Hirshfield Poetry Awards, Rambunctious Review and the Frieda Stein Fenster Memorial Poetry Awards. Ms. Miller is married to science fiction writer Richard “Saur Stories” Chwedyk. Her favorite poem of all time is Kenneth Koch’s “Fresh Air.”

Books by Pamela Miller:

Other poems on the web by Pamela Miller:
"In the Midnight Hour"

About Miss Unthinkable:

"Pamela Miller’s much-awaited Miss Unthinkable is a gorgeous and rollicking collection of deliciously debunked myth, ferociously female fables and a whole goddess-poet’s host of surreal subversions that I read through in one awed alliterative sitting. (And then I read it again.) The language sparks, contagious and mellifluous; the energy peaks, then peaks again; and the poems read both hilarious and heartbreaking, their enormous range ‘a stagecoach of/noisemakers, a banshee dance to dazzle the dead.’ Miller’s new book is stunning."
—Maureen Seaton

"Miller has fun with her poems and comes up with the wackiest juxtapositions, liveliest language and wildest similes (‘bleary breasts like the eyes of exhausted yaks’) I’ve ever heard. Reading [her work] aloud is a bit like eating Pop Rocks with a champagne chaser: a series of mini-explosions on the tongue that leaves you lightheaded and happy but with a sense you’ve done something major, and maybe even set a record at it. And there’s no headache—just a hangover of sheer wonder."
—Kathleen Kirk

"Like life, Pamela Miller’s poetry is more than meets the eye. Her comedy has powerful tragic undercurrents. Her tragedy flows over a bed of comedy. Her world moves in ways that are as unexpected as they are authentic. And nobody chooses words and shapes language better. Great stuff."
—Charlie Newman