Wayne Miller
Photo by Chris Kannen
Bio
Originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, Wayne Miller is the author of five poetry collections, most recently We the Jury (Milkweed, 2021) and Post- (2016), which won the Rilke Prize and the Colorado Book Award. He has co-translated two poetry collections by Moikom Zeqo: Zodiac (Zephyr, 2015), which was shortlisted for the PEN Center USA Award for Translation, and I Don’t Believe in Ghosts (BOA, 2007). Miller has received the George Bogin, Lucille Medwick, and Lyric Poetry Awards from the Poetry Society of America; a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation; the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry; and a Fulbright Distinguished Scholarship to Northern Ireland. With Kevin Prufer, he co-directs the Unsung Masters Book Series. He is a professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where he edits the literary journal Copper Nickel.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Albanian of the short story collection Sellers of Chaos by Moikom Zeqo (1949-2020), who published more than 100 books in his lifetime, though his poetry was suppressed for a decade after a collection in the early 1970s strayed from the Albanian Writers Union's aesthetic tenets. He later became employed by the Archeological Museum of Durrës, where he became Albania's first underwater archeologist. Sellers of Chaos includes stories from an almost 40-year period and includes themes, techniques, and ambitions reflective of many of Zeqo's other works. This project is a collaboration with the daughter of Moikom Zeqo, Kleitia Zeqo.
I have been collaboratively translating Moikom Zeqo’s work since 1997, when I was an undergraduate student—which means that off and on for nearly 25 years I have had the privilege of inhabiting Zeqo’s extraordinary thinking about history and art and his brilliantly idiosyncratic vision of the world. Zeqo died in 2020, just a year after I visited him in Tirana, and though we rarely saw each other in-person over the time we knew each other, I have—like so many of Zeqo’s fellow Albanians—been feeling his tremendous loss. I am so grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts for this support, which will allow me to continue my work collaboratively translating his strange and brilliant short stories and, thus, to bring a new aspect of his prolific and singular writing to an English-language audience.