Joshua Gottlieb-Miller
Current City, State, Country
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Joshua Gottlieb-Miller received his PhD and MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston, where he also served as a Poetry Editor and Digital Nonfiction Editor for Gulf Coast. Joshua has published poetry, memoir, hybrid poetry and essays, multimedia writing, and folklore scholarship. His writing has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Tent Writing Conference at the Yiddish Book Center, and elsewhere, and from 2018-2019 he served as an inaugural Post-Harvey Think Tank Fellow at Rice University’s Humanities Research Center, representing folklore. His writing has won the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, the Inprint Barthelme Prize in Poetry, and the Inprint Robert J. Sussman Prize. His debut collection, “The Art of Bagging,” won Conduit’s Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize, and is available now (The Art of Bagging — Conduit). Currently Joshua teaches at San Jacinto College, and lives in Houston with his wife and son. He is excited to be a scholar at Yetzirah’s inaugural conference, in 2023.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
Though I was raised Jewish and have a Jewish family, my adult connection with Judaism and Jewish culture deepened significantly through poetry. My second book, Dybbuk Americana is a researched, hybrid text wrestling with Jewish identity in America, and what it means for my son to inherit that identity. The book explores intersections of Jewishness with race and whiteness in America, art, mysticism, and history. Dybbuk Americana plays with form quite literally, via a series of text boxes that create a two-channel effect: the reader can combine the traditional body of the poem with surrounding and intercutting text boxes to generate multiple interpretations. This innovation in poetic technique maintains a dialogue with Jewish literary lineages: Talmudic traditions of commentary and multiple, sometimes competing interpretations of the oral law, as well as the fragmented nature of geniza. By turns experimental and documentary, interviews with Jewish community members and oral histories of family members, as well as archival materials, inform the book throughout (and remain part of my creative practice).
I suppose it would be impossible for me not to be a Jewish poet—my instinctual discursive methods, the kinds of arguments I make, what I’m drawn to in the mystic and uncertain–I don’t know any other way to write.
Published Works
The Art of Bagging (Conduit Books & Ephemera, 2023)
Author Site
Links to Sample Works
Video Reading
Current Title
Education
St. Mary’s College of Maryland, B.A. in English Literature and Philosophy, 2008
University of Houston, M.F.A. in Creative Writing, 2012
University of Houston, PhD in Literature and Creative Writing, 2021