Joi Miner has been writing for as long as she can remember, but began her career as a spoken word artist. After making it to the finals in the Turner South “My South Speaks” competition, she appeared in a commercial and won slams at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival and the Green Mill in Chicago. Miner has four poetry collections under her belt: Graffitied Gypsy (2003), Fun House Mirrors (2005), Socioanthropologicfeminisms (2010) and Outrun The Night (2012). (Hear her read “The Day I Swam Into a New World,” Teaching Tolerance’s first-ever audio Story Corner.)
A domestic violence and sexual assault survivor and advocate, Miner takes time to teach workshops on how to heal through writing, working with such groups as Standing Together Against Rape (STAR) and the Alabama State University Violence Against Women Program. She has also worked with the Montgomery City/County Public Library to teach poetry writing during their Back to School Boot Camp in 2013. Her company, Poetic Advisory, LLC, is responsible for founding the Annual Juneteenth Culturefest in Montgomery and, more recently, directing and producing a year-long mini-tour of Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf.
Miner is a native of Montgomery, Alabama, and currently lives in Birmingham. She is a wife and mother of two beautiful girls.
