E. Ethelbert Miller, born in New York City in 1950, is a highly respected Washington D.C. based poet and literary activist and, since 1974, the Director of the African-American Resource Center at Howard University.

He is the board chairperson of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) as well as a board member of The Writer's Center and editor of Poet Lore magazine. Mr. Miller is the former chair of the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C. and a former core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars at Bennington College. He was born in New York City, New York, in 1950 and received his B.A. from Howard University. His poetry collections include How We Sleep On the Nights We Don't Make Love (Curbstone Press, 2004), Whispers, Secrets, and Promises (1998), First Light: New and Selected Poems (1994), Where Are the Love Poems for Dictators? (1986), Season of Hunger/Cry of Rain: Poems 1975-1980 (1982), The Migrant Worker (1978), and Andromeda (1974). He also is editor of many anthologies, including the highly-acclaimed In Search of Color Everywhere: A Collection of African American Poetry (1994) and Women Surviving Massacres and Men (1977). He is also the author of the memoir Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer (2000).

His awards include the Columbia Merit Award (1993), the Mayor's Art Award for Literature (1982) and the O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize. In 1979, the Mayor of Washington, DC, proclaimed September 28, 1979 as "E. Ethelbert Miller Day.", an honor bestowed again on May 21, 2001 by the Mayor of Jackson, Tennessee.

Miller is the Founder and Director of the Ascension Poetry Reading Series, one of the oldest literary series in the Washington area. He and his wife live in Washington, D.C.