Poetry
David Mills is a cum laude Yale grad who holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and an MA from New York University, both in creative writing. He’s published four full-length poetry collections: Unhired Hands, The Sudden Country, The Dream Detective, and Boneyarn—winner of the North American Book Award and the only book of poems about slavery in Manhattan. Mr. Mills is also the author of two chapbooks, After Mystic (Massachusetts slavery poems) and How the Earth Answers, which focuses on slavery in the Bronx, the thirteen colonies’ breadbasket during the 1700s. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Jubilat, The Common, Brooklyn Rail, Rattapallax, Poetry Daily, Evergreen Review, and Fence—and he has been a Pushcart Prize finalist. He has also received grants, awards, fellowships and residencies from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Breadloaf, the New York State Council on the Arts (2024 and 2026, the most recent to write a poetry collection about Brooklyn slavery), the Schomburg Center, The American Antiquarian Society, the Lannan Foundation, the Bronx and Queens Councils on the Arts, Flushing Town Hall and the Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize. He lived in Langston Hughes’ landmark Harlem home for three years (was a recipient of the Langston Hughes Society Award) and wrote the audio script for Macarthur-Genius-Award Winner Deborah Willis’ curated exhibition: Reflections in Black:100 Years of Black Photography, which showed at the Whitney Museum. The Juilliard School of Drama commissioned and produced a play by Mr. Mills. He has recorded his poetry on ESPN and RCA Records and has had his works displayed at the Venice Biennale. He has served as poet-in-residence for the Bronx County Historical Society.