Emeritus & Retired Faculty

Professor Mary Ellen Miller earned her BA in English from Berea College and her MA from the University of Kentucky. She began working at WKU in 1963, teaching creative writing and American literature courses throughout her career. In 2011, her collection of poems The Poet’s Wife Speaks won the Old Seventy Creek Press Poetry Prize. In 2014 she and collaborator Morris Allen Grubbs edited Every Leaf A Mirror: A Jim Wayne Miller Reader, which won a Weatherford Award as one of the best books on Appalachian culture for 2014. During her career, Professor Miller made too many contributions to WKU to count, including two terms as a Faculty Regent, co-founder of the Center for Robert Penn Warren Studies, and founder of the Jim Wayne Miller Celebration of Writing. In 2017, President Gary Ransdell named Miller the first WKU Poet Laureate.