Virtual Event: Kei Miller

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes award-winning poet, novelist, and short story writer KEI MILLER for a discussion of his debut essay collection, Things I Have Withheld. He will be joined in conversation by acclaimed writer and scholar JULIETTA SINGH, author of The Breaks: An Essay.

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About Things I Have Withheld

In this moving and lyrical collection of essays, the award-winning poet and novelist Kei Miller explores the silence in which so many important things are kept. He examines the experience of discrimination through this silence and what it means to breach it: to risk words, to risk truths. And he considers the histories our bodies inherit—the crimes that haunt them, and how meaning can shift as we move throughout the world, variously assuming privilege or victimhood.

Through letters to James Baldwin, encounters with Liam Neeson, Soca, Carnival, family secrets, love affairs, white women’s tears, questions of aesthetics and more, Miller powerfully and imaginatively recounts everyday acts of racism and prejudice.

With both the epigrammatic concision and conversational cadence of his poetry and novels, Things I Have Withheld is a great artistic achievement: a work of beauty which challenges us to interrogate what seems unsayable and why—our actions, defence mechanisms, imaginations and interactions—and those of the world around us.

Praise for Things I Have Withheld

"Entrancing . . . Miller vividly depicts the ways colonialism, racism, homophobia, and privilege have shaped his life . . . Sharp as blades, [his] words cut to the core." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Miller's storytelling is impeccable, and his verse is arresting and beautiful. Things I Have Withheld is a remarkable contribution to literature." —De'Shawn Winslow, author of In West Mills

"[His work] seduces and shocks you even as it wrestles with the very nature of storytelling itself." —Marlon James