Unburying Malcom Miller

Unburying Malcolm Miller

Filmmakers Kevin Carey and Mark Hillringhouse bring the outsider poet Malcolm Miller back to life in this riveting documentary. Miller found early success with his poetry and a close friendship with McGill classmate Leonard Cohen, but later succumbed to mental illness and obscurity and living a life on the margins. In spite of his struggles, Miller left behind over three thousand poems. After his death in 2014, retired Salem State Professor and writer Rod Kessler who befriended Miller in the last year of his life, took it upon himself to sift through the body of Miller’s work and tell his story through a series of interviews with the people who knew him. The film also showcases Miller’s poems with readings by local poets in various locations across his hometown of Salem, Massachusetts. Carey and Hillringhouse have also collaborated on a film in 2012 called “All That Lies Between Us,” about New Jersey poet Maria Mazziotti Gillan.

KEVIN CAREY is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Salem State University. He has published three books – a chapbook of fiction, The Beach People from Red Bird Chapbooks (2014) and two books of poetry from Cavankerry Press, The One Fifteen to Penn Station (2012) and Jesus Was a Homeboy (2016) which was recently selected as an Honor Book for the 2017 Paterson Literary Prize. Two poems from this collection have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac. Kevincareywriter.com

MARK HILLRINGHOUS is a poet and a photographer, a founding editor of The American Book Review, and a contributing editor for The New York Arts Journal. Thrice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and a three-time recipient of a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship. He is a member of the English and Fine Arts Department at Passaic County Community College. His recent books include BETWEEN FRAMES a book of his poems and photographs, and more recently, PATERSON LIGHT AND SHADOW a collection of Maria Gillan’s Paterson poems and his black and white Paterson photographs published by Serving House Books. mhillringhouse.zenfolio.com

ROD KESSLER’s short story collection, Off in Zimbabwe, won the Annual Series Award of the Associated Writing Programs in 1984. His stories have been anthologized in The Literary Dog and Flash Fiction. He is a past director of the Eastern Writers’ Conference at Salem State College (now University), where he edited The Sextant, the faculty magazine, and Soundings East, the literary magazine and was a longtime (1983-2014) professor of English and Coordinator of the Creative Writing Program. Since his retirement three years ago he has been concentrating on preserving the writing of Salem poet Malcolm Miller (1930-2014).