About Yael K. Miller

I have been interested in stories from a very young age, and as a child I frequented the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), where paintings that told stories held my interest.

At the University of Pennsylvania I majored in English with a Medieval/Renaissance concentration and minored in Classical Studies. I like to say that I spent four years learning story. I was also a University Scholar during all four years, twice receiving research grant funds for my writing projects.

In May of 2004 I attended Penn-at-Cannes, watching 35 films in 12 days of the Cannes Film Festival before going on to Italy to see the Baroque church paintings I had studied at Penn.

In my senior year I won the 2004-2005 Penn Playwriting Fellowship, which earned a stipend and a week-long workshopping of my short play JULIET’S NURSE (an Ovidian retelling of Shakespeare’s ROMEO AND JULIET).

An earlier version of that play had won an invitation for me to the New South Young Playwrights Short Play Festival in Atlanta, Georgia, in the summer of 2003.

In the spring of 2007 I became interested in New Orleans and the effect Hurricane Katrina had on it. I began to write a half-hour tv pilot about a 12-year-old boy who moves with his father to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

In October 2007, two years after Hurricane Katrina, I visited New Orleans for the first time – discovering the places where my characters roam.

Somewhere along the way I changed the story from a tv pilot to a Middle Grade novel, and in the spring of 2013 I self-published JACK STORM AND NEW ORLEANS HOODOO.