Josephine Miles, UC Berkeley Poet and Scholar, Dies

Josephine Miles, a well-known West Coast poet and the first woman granted tenure in the University of California’s English department, is dead at age 73.

Miss Miles died Sunday of pneumonia at her Berkeley home, school officials reported.

At her death she was professor emeritus of English at the Berkeley campus and one of only 12 faculty members in the nine-campus school system to hold the prestigious title of University Professor. The honor is bestowed each year on one senior faculty member in the statewide system.

Her “Collected Poems, 1930-1983,” won Nation magazine’s Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1983 and was one of three finalists for last year’s Pulitzer Prize in poetry. It was the last of two dozen books of verse and criticism authored or edited by Miss Miles in her nearly 50-year career. She was known for writing of the things and places around her, often interspersing the names of neighborhood streets and stores in her poems.

Miss Miles, handicapped since childhood with rheumatoid arthritis, won dozens of scholarly and literary awards and in 1947 was the first woman to win tenure in Berkeley’s department of English.

“Jo Miles was an extraordinary teacher and a wonderful inspiration of courage and creativity who lived and cherished every moment of life,” said UC Berkeley Chancellor Ira Michael Heyman.

Her students have published more than 50 volumes of poems and won at least two national book awards, school officials said.

She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948 and a Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement from the American Academy of Poets in 1978.

Born in Chicago, she was graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California, Los Angeles, earned her master’s and doctoral degrees at UC Berkeley and joined the faculty there in 1940.

Her survivors include two brothers, Richard B. Miles of Walnut Creek and John O. Miles of Laguna Beach and Matsukawa, Japan.