May Miller was an African American poet, playwright and educator who became known as the most widely published female playwright of the Harlem Renaissance, with seven published volumes of poetry during her career as a writer. She was born in Washington, D.C. to father Kelly Miller, professor and founder of the department of sociology at Howard University, and mother Anna May Miller. Their home, located on the university campus, became a gathering place for many black intellectuals and artists including W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, and Langston Hughes. Miller was raised surrounded by individuals who valued and encouraged education and the arts. She began writing poetry at an early age and studied under the writers Mary P. Burrill and Angelina Weld Grimke while attending Dunbar High School. She began attending Howard University in 1916 at the age of 16 and graduated in 1920. While attending college, Miller developed an interest in promoting and performing plays written by African American writers. During this time, she wrote Within the Shadows (1920), a one-act play for which she earned an award. Her entry into the cultural scene of the Harlem Renaissance began with the publishing of her play The Bog Guide (1925), which was awarded third place in the play category for Opportunity magazine's Literary Prize Contest in 1925. After completing some graduate work in poetry and drama at American University and Columbia University, she worked teaching English and speech at Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore, Maryland for twenty years. Miller was motivated to tell the stories of black history and black heroes to the children in her classroom. She also lectured at Monmouth College, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Phillips Exeter Academy. She was also an active member of the S Street Salon, the name given to Georgia Douglas Johnson’s house in Washington, D.C. where every Saturday for forty years black artists and writers would come to meet, socialize, discuss their work, and exchange ideas. Miller continued to write and publish plays, and eventually turned to writing poetry in the 1940s. Through her writing, Miller sought to portray black people with a level of respect and dignity that had been absent in literature at the time. Topics for her plays included historical dramas about Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, feminism, racial issues and class bias within the black community, and African Americans in the military. During the 1970s Miller read her poetry at a number of public and high-profile celebrations, including the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter in 1977. Story derived from Wikipedia.

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