Mary Miller

A native of Jackson and a resident of Oxford, Mary Miller is best recognized for her careful construction of twenty-first-century southern landscapes and narratives. Her stories are unglamorous, as they often center on the everyday and the ordinary, such as Waffle Houses or reality television.

Miller’s stories have been published in The Paris Review, Oxford American, New Stories from the South, and elsewhere. She published her first collection, Big World, in 2009 and her debut novel, The Last Days of California, in 2014. The Last Days of California landed on several prominent recommendation lists, including those from The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. The novel follows fifteen-year-old Jess Metcalf and her family on a westward road trip out of Montgomery, Alabama, on the pretense of preparing for the Second Coming and subsequent Rapture. Jess alternates between boredom and spiritual uncertainty throughout the narrative, yet she gives herself the mission to gather information and ask important questions to fellow travelers she meets on the interstate. Ultimately, The Last Days of California is an American road-trip story in which Miller critiques everything from America’s casino economy to its denial of the global climate crisis.

Miller studied with Frederick Barthelme at the the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi, where she earned her MA before moving to Austin to complete her MFA at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. During the 2014–15 school year, she served as the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. It was on this assignment that she completed Always Happy Hour, a story collection that features an eclectic cast of characters looking to navigate a variety of spaces and relationships from which they feel detached. For Miller’s southern characters, there is no solid community to be found. Instead, their world is one of larger crises, such as the long aftermath of the Great Recession.

Miller published her second novel, Biloxi, in 2019. In a departure from prior work, Biloxi focuses on a male narrator, Louis McDonald Jr., a sixty-three-year-old retiree and Biloxi resident. Louis’s life is largely unremarkable as he lingers on the memory of his ex-wife, watches Fox News over leftover chicken wings, and stumbles his way through Social Security bureaucracy and grocery store check-out lines. A sudden change in his life comes with his adopting, under suspicious circumstances, a neurotic dog named Layla. Ultimately, the novel is about financial precarity, failed inheritance, and how positive change may be a possibility, even in our golden years.