The End of Childhood: An Evening with Wayne Miller

"These poems achieve the beautiful, uncanny fusing that Miller defines as poetry itself.”—Rick Barot, author of Moving the Bones

A tender and provocative collection of poems interrogating the troubles and wonders of both childhood and parenthood against the backdrop of global violence.

From accomplished poet Wayne Miller comes a collection examining how an individual’s story both hews to and defies larger socio-political narratives and the sweep of history. A cubist making World War I camouflage, a forlorn panel on the ethics of violence in literature, an obsessive litany of “late capitalist” activities, a military drone pilot driving home after work—here, the awkward, the sweet, and the disturbing often merge. And underlying it all is Miller’s own domestic life with two children, who highlight the hopeful and ingenious aspects of childhood, which is “not // as I had thought / the thicket of light back at the entrance // but the wind still blowing / invisibly toward me / through it.”

The End of Childhood, Miller’s sixth collection of poems, is his most intimate, juxtaposing his own fraught youth with that of his children amid insurrection and pandemic, vacation and vocation, art and war. This piercing book spares nothing as it searches for a measure of personal benevolence and truth in today’s turbulent, brutalizing world—which it confronts through a singularly candid and lyrical voice.

6 pm reception/6:30 pm program
Free & open to the public. Registration required.

Copies of The End of Childhood will be available for sale & signing courtesy of Joseph-Beth Cincinnati.

About Wayne Miller

Born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, Wayne Miller is the author of six poetry collections, most recently The End of Childhood (Milkweed, 2025) and We the Jury (2021). His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, as well as the UNT Rilke Prize, two Colorado Book Awards, two Pushcart Prizes, the George Bogin Award, the Lucille Medwick Award, the Lyric Poetry Award, and a Fulbright Distinguished Scholarship to the Seamus Heaney Centre in Northern Ireland. He has co-translated two books by the Albanian writer Moikom Zeqo—most recently Zodiac (Zephyr, 2015), shortlisted for the PEN Center USA Award in Translation—and he has co-edited three books, most recently Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (Milkweed, 2016). He teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, co-directs the Unsung Masters Book Series, and edits the literary journal Copper Nickel.