Tucson author Susan Cummins Miller, a native Californian, spent childhood weekends and summers exploring the blue highways of the West, camping, hiking, and fishing with her family. She received degrees in anthropology, history, and geology, and worked as a field geologist and college instructor prior to becoming a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her novels–Death Assemblage, Detachment Fault, Quarry, Hoodoo, Fracture, and Chasm (Texas Tech University Press)–feature Frankie MacFarlane, a field geologist, college professor, and geosleuth who, like the author, lives and works in the West. Miller also compiled and edited A Sweet, Separate Intimacy: Women Writers of the American Frontier, 1800-1922, an anthology of 34 women writers who published during the settlement years of the West.
Her short fiction, essays and poems have appeared in regional and national anthologies, and in both print and online journals. “When Runestones Speak,” the poem in Tempered Runes: Bluing the Blade, originated in a workshop on rune poems offered by Jim Paul, former director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Other recent work can be found in 2020’s What We Talk About When We Talk About It: Variations on the Theme of Love, volumes I-II (Darkhouse Books); Unstrung; The Write Launch; The Dewdrop; and Snapdragon: A Journal of Art and Healing. Miller was a 2018 Pima County Public Library Writer in Residence and is a research affiliate of the University of Arizona’s Southwest Institute for Research on Women.
www.susancumminsmiller.com
Tempered Runes Press Contributions
“When Runestones Speak” – Poem – Volume 1, Number 1 of Bluing the Blade