| Lily Poritz Miller in Eastern Europe Photo by Olga Zabludoff, 1998 |
| Lily Poritz Miller, who now heads her own editorial service, began her career as an editor at Macmillan in New York, where she worked with such distinguished writers as Jane Yolen and the Irish storyteller and poet, Padraic Colum. She credits Colum, who wrote a poem for her, as being a major influence in her publishing career. During this time she also produced a revised and updated edition of the Jennie Hall classic, Buried Cities. She was brought to Toronto by Jack McClelland in 1972 as senior editor at McClelland and Stewart. During her 18-year tenure at the company, she worked with some of the most gifted Canadian authors, including Roloff Beny, Austin Clarke, Leonard Cohen, Sylvia Fraser, Alistair MacLeod, Farley Mowat, Michael Ondaatje, Mordecai Richler and Gabrielle Roy. This era in Canadian publishing is documented in James King's biography Jack: A Life With Writers. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Lily Miller moved to Massachusetts with her family when she was fifteen. She has taught creative writing at the City University of New York, and her short stories have been published in the anthology American Scene: New Voices. Her play My Star of Hope was performed off-Broadway and The Proud One received honorable mention in the national playwriting contest sponsored by Samuel French. The play was produced in Toronto and published by Playwrights Canada and the International Readers' Theatre. Her play A Greater Love appeared as part of Alumnae Theatre Company's New Ideas Festival 2004. She became involved in her family's ancestry when she first traveled to Eastern Europe in 1992. In 1998 she and Olga Zabludoff edited If I Forget Thee - the destruction of the shtetl Butrimantz. In 2005 her program "Journey to My Boba's Shtetl" was presented during Holocaust Education Week at the Workmen's Circle and the Al Green Theatre in Toronto. In 2007 she was featured in the TV program "Israel Today" which was broadcast nationally in Canada. She co-edited an English-language translation of letters from the Yiddish chronicling the quest of a young man from a small Lithuanian shtetl to reach America via Cuba in the 1920s. Entitled A Thousand Threads: a story told through Yiddish letters, it was published by Remembrance Books, Washington, DC in 2005. A staged reading from the book was presented at the Leah Posluns Theatre in Toronto. Her screenplay, Paved in Gold, inspired by this material, was showcased in Toronto in 2006 under the direction of Anthony Furey. She is presently at work on a screenplay, Brush Strokes, a story of a brilliant musician haunted by Holocaust memories who suffers a stroke in the prime of his life. . She is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America, International PEN, and Women in Film and Television Toronto. |
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