Jeffrey Alan Miller is an award-winning English professor and children’s book author whose work has been supported by a Rhodes Scholarship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship or “Genius Grant,” among other honors.

His debut children’s picture book, The Music in Words, with illustrations by Hadas Hayun, will be published by Rocky Pond Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in Spring 2026. The book takes readers on a joyful, lyrical exploration of the different kinds of music words can make through meter, rhyme, and other possibilities of poetic language.

As a professor, he specializes in the study of Renaissance or “early modern” literature, history, and theology. The author of numerous articles and several academic books-in-progress, he gained international notice when he discovered what is now the earliest known draft of the King James Bible (first published in 1611), and he has received coverage from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, MSNBC, The Times (U.K.), The Guardian, and other media outlets around the world. In 2019, he became the first scholar of Renaissance English literature to be selected as a MacArthur Fellow in over a quarter century.

Born in Arkansas and raised in Texas, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton University in 2006 with an undergraduate degree in English and Creative Writing, and he went on to earn his doctorate in English Language and Literature in 2012 from the University of Oxford, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on John Milton, early modern theology, and the process of thinking through writing. (In his spare time at Oxford, he was also a member of the university’s Men’s “Blues”/Varsity Basketball Team and President of the Oxford University Basketball Club, helping players much better than he to achieve an undefeated record in the annual “Varsity” Men’s Blues basketball game against the University of Cambridge and to as high as a third-place finish in the annual British Universities & Colleges National Championship Basketball Tournament during his years on the team.)

He is currently an Associate Professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey, and, when not in Montclair, he lives in Boston with his wife and their three young children, the music of his life.