ARTIST STATEMENT: BEN MILLER

The graphic novel What Days Are Like When There Are Only Nights confronts the enigmatic circumstances of the refugee and the challenge of finding a way to continue amid chaos. It expresses, and addresses, the complexity of the dream of freedom, the nightmare of a journey with no guarantees, the courage involved in putting one hour in front of the other, the exhaustion and disorientation and comradeship, the good luck, the bad luck, and the often contradictory lessons learned from each successive step (or page) of inspired flight.

Ben Miller is the author of River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll Amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa (Lookout Books). His prose has been featured in Best American Essays, Best American Experimental Writing, One Story, Southern Review, AGNI, New England Review, Raritan, Yale Review, Antioch Review, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.