Cherryl Floyd-Miller

Cherryl Floyd-Miller, also known as BLUE, is a poet, playwright, and fiber artist.

She is the 2006 inaugural winner of the Poetry Daily-Virginia Arts of the Book Companion Poems Contest. She has held writing fellowships or received grants from Poets & Writers, Inc., the Fulton County Arts Council, Idyllwild Summer in Poetry, Caldera, Cave Canem, the Vermont Studio Center and the Indiana Arts Commission. Her work appears in Poetry magazine, MiPOesias, Terminus, storySouth, Crab Orchard Review, and is forthcoming in the anthology The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (University of Georgia Press, 2007), edited by Nikky Finney.  

She has published two volumes of poetry. The first, Utterance: A Museology of Kin was a semifinalist for the 2001 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and a 2002 finalist for the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. Her second volume of poems, Chops (Nexus Press, 2004), won the 2005 Gold SEED Award and is housed in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art. Her third collection, Exquisite Heats, is forthcoming from London-based Salt Publishing.  

Cherryl is currently polishing her fourth collection of poems, Hoofer, an imagined biographical exploration of American tap legend Gregory Hines. She is also writing and quilting for a collaborative fiber arts project titled “The Race Quilt,” which uses the poems and other writings of more than twenty writers to engage a dialogue about race in America.