Poetess and Playwriter May Miller was born on January 26, 1899 in Washington, DC. She grew up in faculty housing on the Howard University campus in a period when the university was a national gathering place for Black artists and intellectuals. May Miller wrote poetry from an early age and often wore a pair of earrings she had purchased with her earnings from her first published poem. At Dunbar High School she studied under such noted writers as Mary P. Burrill and Angelina Weld Grimké. She began attending Howard University in 1916 at the age of 16. Miller developed an interest in promoting and performing plays written by African American writers.
She graduated first in her class from Howard University in 1920, receiving an award for her one-act play “Within the Shadows.” She also did postgraduate study in literature at American University and Columbia University. After graduating first in her class at Howard University in 1920, she set out to become a playwright and poet. For periods in that era, she lived in Harlem, and at other times, she traveled there from Washington with Langston Hughes and poet Countee Cullen for literary gatherings.
She won third place in a drama competition sponsored by “Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life” magazine, and several of her plays were produced on college campuses. But her writing never brought her celebrity status. 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. An award for another play she had written, sponsored by Opportunity Magazine in 1925, was presented at a dinner attended by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, and Jean Toomer.
After completing some graduate work in poetry and drama at American University and Columbia University, she taught English and speech at the Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore, MD. During her time teaching, she was an active member of Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Saturday evening salons. While there she acted, directed, and collaborated in the writing of two volumes of plays and pageants through her work with the Negro Little Theatre Movement. For 20 years, she commuted daily to Baltimore to teach English, speech and drama at Frederick Douglass High School. Miller openly addressed race and class inside and outside of the Black community.
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. Four of her historical plays, including Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, were included in Negro History in Thirteen Plays (1935), an anthology she co-edited with Willis Richardson. They also dealt with feminism, racial issues and class bias within the Black community. Her plays “Stragglers in the Dust” (1930), was about African Americans in the military, and “Nails and Thorns” (1933), dramatized lynching.
Miller retired from teaching in 1943 and redoubled her poetry writing efforts. She published seven volumes that included “Into the Clearing”, 1959 and “Dust of Uncertain Journey”, 1975. She wrote with feeling about people and places in and around Washington and about memories and folk tales from her childhood. May Miller held several posts as a visiting faculty member. During the 1960s, she was arts coordinator for the D.C. public schools under the auspices of the Washington Commission on the Arts. She also served on the Folger Library Advisory Committee. In the 1970s and 1980s, she often read her poems aloud at formal and informal settings.