Patricia Cleary Miller is professor emerita of English at Rockhurst University, where she founded and edited the Rockhurst Review. She is the author of Starting a Swan Dive (Daniel L. Brenner Award) from BkMk Press, as well as the poetry titles Dresden and Crimson Lights, and the nonfiction title Westport: Missouri's Port of Many Returns. Her work
has appeared in Stand, Connecticut Review, New Letters, Cottonwood, I-70 Review, and elsewhere. She won a Pushcart Prize for one of the poems in Can You Smell the Rain? Her secondary school was the French Convent of Notre Dame de Sion.

She is a graduate of Radcliffe College (where she also held a Bunting fellowship), the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and the University of Kansas. For eight years she was poet laureate of the Harvard Alumni Association. She is a past president of the Writers Place and won its annual Muse Award.