Josephine Miles's major interest was always poetry. In the course of a long career as poet and academic she wrote volumes of poetry and critical books about poetry in roughly equal numbers, examining and practicing the poet's craft with the same sense of commitment.

The daughter of Reginald Odber and Josephine Lackner Miles, Josephine Louise Miles was born in Chicago, but she spent most of her life in California. Living there sporadically during her early years, the family went to southern California when she was one because of her father's insurance business, and they returned when she was five hoping that the aridity of the nearby desert would ease her arthritis. In the desert, where the family, which also included two brothers, often went camping, Miles came to love the open bareness of Andreas Canyon. Back in Evanston, Illinois, when she was eight, Miles wrote her first poem...