About Me

My grandfather's butcher shop. He's the man in the white apron in the doorway.                                                     “Dependably provocative…”

I’m a writer and a community organizer. I live in the Bronx now, but I grew up in a depressed depressing middle-of-nowhere town in upstate New York. I was trained as a butcher, and my father was a butcher, and his father was a butcher, but our butcher shop went down the toilet when our town was eaten alive by Wal-Mart. Since then I’ve been a vegetarian. I went to Rutgers University, where I majored in Russian Literature and Cinema Studies, and met my boyfriend, although we didn’t start dating until after college. Now we’ve been together for six years. I’ve had pieces published in lots of zines, anthologies, and print and online literary journals. While I mostly write fiction, once in a while I write essays on things that make me really happy or really really angry (like horror movies, homelessness, homophobia, HIV/AIDS, punk rock, protest tactics). Check Me, at sixteen, butchering. under “Publications” for a list of some of my favorites, including links to the ones that are available online.

When I’m not trying to smash the system via subversive and sometimes-smutty stories, I’m trying to smash the system by organizing poor people to fight collectively for social justice. At my day job, I coordinated the writing of a major report that has been made required reading in urban planning courses at Columbia University—and has been banned in New York State prisons. As if I wasn’t busy enough, I recently became a member of the Board of Directors of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice.

If you like - or hate - any of my work, you should definitely write to me:

Juancy, Me, Marisol - the Snow Tube Mafia (pic by Kathy)

samjmiller79 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com

And this is what I look like now. Do all these pictures make me seem shallow and/or self-obsessed? I’m sorry.  I have a problem. Me, in Copake Lake

Me, up against the wall

Me, triumphing over alcoholism

Naomi wants you to vote. And so do I.

Just another day at work, battling evil.   My handsome boyfriend, and somebody else's cat.